History in maya

[elvis75k]

delete history and freeze trasformation are (for me) really dangerous in the progress of the work. I never delete history if not necessary, for example, if i have a mesh with very low poly and if i smooth this one and have a good result, i will not delete history becouse maybe i need in future to give some modification and too much cv may be confusing me... Sometime if i create a surface from may curves, i prefeer delete the history and after that i delete also the curves. If you have much ram to spend leave your information as they are and go on....

i delete my history in english acquaintance!

[MasonDoran]

History is essentially general term of nodes that record your actions in Maya. In fact, the entire structure of the nodes can be seen in the hypergraph. Deleting history, will remove the build up of nodes that are affecting a particular object, either baking the nodes into the object, or removing the effect of the nodes on the object.

History is a handy tool so u can go back in time and edit the individual nodes to tweak things. Every node you see in the channel box/hypergraph is a part of history. Many tools and commands have many differant settings/options that u use through history.



example: when you create poly cylinder with history turned on, you can go into the channel box and you will see a node that u can specifiy the resolution of the cylinder. Delete the history and you delete that node. If you then extrude a face on it...with history on, you make multiple extrudes and then select the first extrude in the channel box, show maniplulator....and you can then move re adjust that extrude...which will of course change the descending extrudes. Working with history on Nurbs is also very nice.



When to delete history?

When modelling, any time things get slow or whenever you want to streamline the model and bake all of your changes.

Always delete history before skinning the mesh.

Whenever you want to bake a deformers deformations into the mesh, you delete history.

Sometimes funny things start happening giving you strange results, deleting history can clean things up for you.



When NOT to delete history!!

If you delete history on a skinned object, you remove the skeleton and all of the weight information.

If you delete history on an object with blendshapes, you remove the blendshapes and their connection to the parent.

Proxy mesh....if you delet history u remove the connection between the 2 meshes.

[elvis75k]

...well 2byts, this was exactly what i want to say!
:scream:

[kiri]

thanks 2byts!
thats a really good explanation.
And im lucky i didnt delete it, coz im using a proxy :eek:

just to clear a few things up:
once you start skinning an object, you shouldnt delete the history from that point on? (for ever?) ;)

also, is there a way to delete history selectively? I mean isolate those high level connections that you want to keep but get rid of all the little tweaks that you dont need?

thanks!

[MasonDoran]

kiri....

Nothing beats experimenting with history. just play around with the connection editor and hypergraph...connecting and disconnecting things.....and then trying to reconnect them.

If you delete history on a skinned object, what you delete is the skincluster node. This node holds all of the weight information for each vertice to each bone.

Work around: download from highend3d.com the "saveWeights" script. Once your weights are saved, you can then detach the skin....delete the history on it....move some verts around or change the Uvs or whatever......then re-skin it and load your weights back on to the mesh.

There is another script for deleting history nodes selectively...but that is also limited because you are not actually baking the history into the object but just deleting the nodes that you attached to it.

[kiri]

thanks 2byts
im starting to see how it works...
im just paranoid that i will delete history and everything will go pear shaped, and i'll have to start from scratch again :surprised

but having said that, im deleting regularly now (during modelling) and so far no problems.
thanks again for the info

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