Is it possible to smooth an entire model which has seperate parts at once? I've grouped my models parts into an organised hierarchy, selecting the root and then smoothing only smooths one object. Another crappy Maya issue or am I missing something?
Uh, no. I'm saying its annoying having to select little accessories individually to see them smoothed, hence wanting to group them and smooth the group because when I want to unsmooth I have to go around to every object and turn smoothing back to 0. Explained it enough for ya?
I've never had any problems selecting multiple objects and smoothing. Be careful if you have a bunch of instances, smoothing them can sometimes bring maya to a halt. Try selecting all the objects and not the root.
Yeah I could just drag a box to select all the geo and then smooth, it'd be more elegant if you could just select the root group in the outliner, and then it'd smooth everything down the hierachy though. Selecting little accessories manually sucks.
Here is a link I found on Highend, a script called active smooth poly. I haven't tried it myself. http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/poly_tools/3304.html
Select all the objects how ever you like >channel box>devisions 0 = all objects unsmoothed. In theory this would be a really easy shelf button to make so you could toggle between smoothed and unsmoothed, but I'm sorry I have no mel skills.
If you have it all grouped, you can expand the group in the outliner, select the members of the group and then do your smooth operation. (the same as hitting select hierarchy) You could also select the members of a group in the hypergraph. Some other alternatives: Make a 'quick select set', which you can then pin to your…