Maya: Duplicated deformers not affecting their shape

Forgetful

Hi. My problem is fairly simple. I have several non-linear deformers all hooked up to and object and everything with those deformers is just great.

The problem comes when I duplicate the piece of geometry along with all the parented deformers.

The new deformers will not affect the geometry that they are parented to. They group under the parent piece of geometry just fine in the outline, but when I modify the deformers attributes nothing affects the geometry..

any thoughts?

I should not that I am just duplicating the geometry and its parented deformers with the duplication command CTRL +D, and not by simply CTRL copy/pasting.

Here is a shot of my hypergraph and the non working deformers circled in red. The rose in that picture was created by duplicating each petal and manually recreating its deformers 1 by 1 for each new petal. ... "ECHH" I am praying there is a better way as I would eventually like to write some expressions to animate these deformers.



It is also of note that the deformers and geometry that were duplicated have a different (white square) icon that is the same icon you get when you group objects together. I have no idea why this is. I really appreciate your help fellas. I know this is a pretty dry problem.

kodde

Did you try Edit > Duplicate Special?
There's a few extra options. I think its the "Duplicate Input Graph" you want.

Those deformers are history states? Then you shouldn't need to select all the history state nodes, only the actual geometry. At least not when using duplicate input graph.

Nice flower btw.

sama.van

Yeah the white thing is a transform. Maya do that when he keep history of something dump.
(same when you combine 2 objects...)

You can go in the " Edit /// Duplicate Special" menu.
and try the "Assign Unique name to child node".

You maya du plicate object with your deformer but cannot keep connection with the first pPlane 2. Then it creates something empty.
The "Assign Unique name to child node" help to keep these connections.


And if it doesn't work please send to me your pPlane2 object with 2 or 3 of his children deformer and I will try to do a melscript for that

Forgetful

Thanks for the speedy response fellas. I really appreciate it.

Duplicating special worked. I checked the "duplicate input graph" and the "Assign unique name to child node" boxes. Now the geometry duplicates and keeps its associations with it's modifiers.

Now the next step is creating controls and animating it blooming. Thanks again fellas