history
 

hey people,

I understand that deleting the history results in a lighter scene, but when i delete the history in a scene, the file gets bigger in size. So... i dont understand it. :( Can somebody explain this to me? thanks in advance.

tiz

It's possible... It depends on the scene.

An example may clarify this problem:

Suppose that you create a simple polygon sphere. The scene is quite small, because you need very few data for the sphere.

Now use the smooth command. If you don't delete the history, Maya has the info for the sphere (few data) and the info for the smoothing (also few data) and these are the only things that Maya would save in a file. So when you reload the scene, Maya will recreate all the steps used during the creation of the models.

Now delete the history... Deleting the history, Maya cannot know anymore what steps you did for modeling the smoothed sphere, so what happens is that you have a sphere compose of a (huge) list of vertices.
If you save the scene now, Maya has to save all this positions (and may be a really big number!) instead of few parameters, so the file is bigger.

That's all

Bye!!

thanks for the info mascal! But there's still one thing i need to know. Is a scene without history easier for a computer to handle?

It depends on how much history there is.

In the example of the previous answer, loading the file with history would be fast, but managing the scene by Maya would be a bit slow (because of the recreation of all the steps).

Without the history, Maya would load the file slower (because of the bigger amount of data). The managing of the scene would be almost the same, because Maya doesn't have to recreate all the steps, but it has a bit more data to manage.

When you have an heavy scene, with much history, the time used for reacreating all the steps would be much higher than the time used for managing only the resulting data.

So, for simple scenes it doesn't matter if you keep the history, but for very large scene you should keep your work clean and without history (if you can).

Bye!!

thanks again!