Workflow questions
 

Hi,

I've got a question regarding workflow and deleting histories. I believe that you shouldn't delete after you paint weights, but what is the situation for blend shapes, cloth etc? Say you model, create blend shapes/hair/cloth, bind, paint weights - at what point does it become unsafe to delete your history?

Also, concerning smoothed meshes - should you just complete an animation unsmoothed, then smooth your mesh? Or smooth a copy, keep it aside, and then attach that mesh to the skeleton?

Thanks,

gubar.

Okay, these are valid points I will answer best I can.

Creating the model is fine, delete history as you go. But the minute you bind it and paint weights your history will sort of build up again becuase of the skin clusters being created to the joints etc. But then if you delete the history on the bound figure/model it will come out of the bind and all your skin clusters will be lost., and the character will be in the modelling state so to speak. the same goes for blend shapes, if you delete the history on a head once the targets are fed in you'll lose them. So some history is good some is bad.

Also worth pointing out is that if you are rendering a still image for example of a posed figure you may want to delete the history and delete the skeleton entirely to say sculpt a better model in the desired position for you render. It will also make the scene lighter for this type of exercise

Hope Im making sense
Jay

Thanks jay,

makes perfect sense. It's kind of what I thought, just wanted to get another opinion before I take my project any further. Basically, you can delete all your histories while you model (and texture I guess), but once you're past that stage the history becomes integral to the project.

Thanks,

gubar

Yeah, you don’t want to delete your history after you do that. You can always delete a part of history you don’t need.
:beer:

How do you delete "part" of the history?

Well, you select the part of the history you want to delete, copy the name (pic 1), go to the select box on the menu bar (to the right of the render stuff), paste the name in (pic 2), hit enter (which selects the history), then hit delete!

Cool, or what?

I must be missing something, that just deletes my model?

Oh well good job I keep an eye on my history.

What piece of history did you delete?

I mad ea cube, inserted 2 edge loops, then smoothed the cube, selected one of the edge loop splits and did what you said, bang deleted the whole thing

That’s odd…… After you hit enter, does it select the edge loop history?