Hello,
I’m sorry if this is me being stupid but I’m new to Maya and couldn’t find a solution online.
My problem is that my rig and animation that I set up no longer works after I converted my ‘smooth mesh preview’ to polygons. Is there a simple way to smooth my mesh without harming the rig and animations that I have already set up.
I only realised that my mesh wasn’t very high quality when I imported it into Unity, so now I’m trying to improve the amount of polygons in the mesh.
Thanks
Not sure how Unity works, as in what do you output from Maya, BUT, what you can easily do even after all the animations are complete, is select your finished animated model, and go Mesh -> Smooth. Now as long as you keep the smooth node above the skinCluster (not sure if you can even move it in the inputs stack), the smooth evaluates AFTER the skinCluster, so it is essentially the same as previewing it in Smooth Mesh Preview.
I just tried Modify -> Convert -> SMP to Polys as you probably did, and it does the same as what i just described. I presume you went this way, but have no idea where might be the problem. if these don’t work for you, it’s more than weird ^^. You’re welcomed to throw me your scene into my email and I’ll take a look at it, cuz this problem seems very illogical to me and problem solving is awesome 
Hey nemeru, thanks for your reply. I actually remodeled my character today and tried the smooth mesh technique after rigging it and it worked fine. So I’m not sure what I was doing the first time, probably just had the wrong thing clicked/selected.
I foolishly made my character with his arms by his sides which means I’ve now got a lot of ‘painting weight skin’ to do. Otherwise I’m all good.
I also enjoy problem solving…when I can solve the problem 
No problem, mate. One thing - i would advise you to only paint the shoulder region until it looks good when posed into the T-pose, and then leave it posed, dupe it, and then do the real painting on it.
Essentially just painting to pose it, then screwing the skinCluster, and treating it only then as a final model.
Trying to skin a ‘posed’ character right, would be a bigger pain in the ass… Just a word of advice. You can avoid the classic ‘oooooh…’ moment ^^
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