Using History
 

I know this, is either a very amature question, or impossible..one of the two..But
How woudl one use history to say for instance....
go back to the unsmoothed version of a peice of geometry, after maya had been saved and closed out...
because..eh.. i ... closed and saved maya after i'd smoothed two peices of geometry to see how they were looking....i forgot i smoothed them.
G

You can't. Once you close Maya the history is erased.

Get in the habit of creating multiple saves. For instance:

save1.ma
save2.ma
save3.ma
save4.ma
etc.

That way you always have something to go back to in case the latest file gets corrupted or you do something you shouldn't have done.

I normally do, was just working so fast on this..only spent like 15 minutes on it the entire night and it never occured to me to save... No bother..i'll just remodel it..or deal wiht laying out the uv's on the smoothed version one.. which ever is faster..
G

You could always try using the Reduce Poly button. Get it down to a manageable poly count then rearrange the CVs.

When My historys turned on I can smooth an object save the scene, close maya, open it up again and the smooth function is still there in the attribute editor. Just tested it out to make sure.

Or am I missing the point?

yea as long as you didnt use the clear history command, in your attributes editor under the IMPUTS section there should be a imput called PolySmoothFace. CLick on that and change your divisions to 0 and you will have your base mesh again.

@gster123 - Knew I should have posted this earlier. I was thinking the same thing.

I think Dave means that the Undo List is nuked when you exit maya, as opposed to the Construction History. Just loose use of terminology.

Another way of doing it is to open the object in the attribute editor, same as 99gsturbo's reply, you need to still have the object's construction history intact. If you select the tab called polySmoothFace1 or equiv, open the part called "Node Behaviour" you can change the NodeState dropdown box to Has No Effect. (Noe this has provided some with probs in the past, i.e selecting "Has No Effect" has no effect:p )

If you then copy the result of either way of doing it, you've got a nice, clean low poly version again.