intermediate objects and duplication

[Yaleh paxton-harding]

Hi All,

Something that has bugged me for quite sometime is how Maya will duplicate intermediate objects when you duplicate a deformer rigged object. For example, let's say I have some deformers going into a given shape, and I then want to make duplicates of it for say blendshapes, or whatever, when I do this I generally also end up duplicating all the *Orig* intermediate shapes too. Is there a SIMPLE way around this. Of course I could trace my way back and copy the intermediate (which may or may not be what I need). Or what I usually do is delete them as I duplicate stuff. Or just search for *Orig and delete all that don't seem to have any connections to networks. I think that much of the bloat that gets into Maya files come from this. As an asset goes through development, it can get much heavier as a result. So what's the elegant solution?

Thanks ALL!

Y.

[Jeremy Raven]

Have you tried the Duplicate Special and turned off 'Duplicate input
connections'. Just a suggestion.

On Oct 20, 9:28 am, Yaleh paxton-harding

[Yaleh paxton-harding]

It actually does the same thing then unfortunately. THe command for both is duplicate -rr. Thanks..

[Jeremy Raven]

Im not an animator so sorry for the basic questions but do you still
want to duplicate the deformer rig along with the output mesh?

On Oct 20, 9:48 am, Yaleh paxton-harding

[Jeremy Raven]

Oh I see your problem now...that would be a pain. I guess a mel script
could select all mesh objects by name "*Orig" and then check to see if
there are any plugs, if not delete.

[Yaleh paxton-harding]

Hey Jeremy, yes I think that would be best, but I just find this to be non-intuitive and strange behavior which creates lots of problems for people (file bloat) and they don't even realize it. It makes me question myself (like, is it just me??), and so I just wanted to put it out there to see what others know about it. Thanks. Imagine this; you rig a fairly heavy character and then pull dozens of duplicates for say face rigging. Now you have much much more meshes hidden in your file then you need. I'm almost certain you cannot remove these with file optimize tool.. This leads to slower load times, memory issues, network clogging, and less manageable archives.. I feel like I must be missing something..

Yaleh.

[stephenkmann]

you can also use optimize scene size - delete unused -  deformers

personally I've gotten use to it, there are times when you delete history and it will live the hidden shape node, I've gotten very fast on arrowing down, and to the left, delete, left delete, etc until they are gone as a habit.

-=s

[Yaleh paxton-harding]

The delete unused deformers I don't think is going to remove all those useless Orig shapes, but I like that selecting the mesh and arrowing into the shape then right arrow key finds them as siblings.. I actually was not aware of that- thanks.. Still it's not a good thing that duplicate does this...

[Jeremy Raven]

here I threw some code together, it works but hasnt really been
thoroughly tested so try it on an old scene first.

string $nodes[] = `ls -dag`;
string $obj;

for($obj in $nodes){
if(`gmatch $obj "*Orig*"`) {
//print($obj);
string $list[] = `listConnections $obj`;
if(size($list)==0)
delete $obj;
}
}

On Oct 20, 10:20 am, Yaleh paxton-harding

<yaleh.paxton.hard...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The delete unused deformers I don't think is going to remove all those
> useless Orig shapes, but I like that selecting the mesh and arrowing into
> the shape then right arrow key finds them as siblings.. I actually was not
> aware of that- thanks.. Still it's not a good thing that duplicate does
> this...
>

[Yaleh paxton-harding]

Nice! I'll give it a try. I guess, there can be no harm if there are no connections right?

Thanks Jeremy!

Y.

[Yaleh paxton-harding]

Just added a few missing braces. Thanks for putting that together..

[matt estela]

my answer to all that was if getting into those areas of maya, keep a
hypergraph/hypershade window open at all times, and keep an eye on
what maya is doing under the hood. easier to fix problems when they
occur than to wait until the end and be confronted by a nodestorm.

luckily i don't do rigging anymore. :)

-matt

[Sagroth]

Several years ago I've received a scene that was a big problem for
production - mb file was over a gig and really slow to open/save/
submit... After deleting orig nodes and making the trick with
undeformedGeometry attribute for cache nodes I've mentioned in another
thread ("solved" in later versions of maya - thanks adsk) it's become
100mb and not a problem anymore... So, that's a traditional thing in
maya already - it's much more fun to repaint icons several times or
change procedures for renaming nodes than to deal with a huge pack of
stuff like that (sorry, I'm bitching again :) )

Anyway, usually by the end of working with a scene I select all
geometry and open hypergraph with connections - free-floating orig
nodes always bunch up in a pile and have noticeably different color -
it's pretty easy to get rid of them for everything in the scene at
once.

[stephenkmann]

Just double checked the optimize scene and it sems to do exactly what
you guys want

Granted I never run the full optize options at one go. I generally do
them selectively

--
Sent from my mobile device

[Yaleh paxton-harding]

Wait- you saw something for that? Which version?

Anyway, it sounds like other people are well aware of the issue, but seriously- that's pretty bad.. Imho it shouldn't happen at all and for the uninitiated, it can definitely cause problems..

Thanks all for the responses..

Yaleh.