I am working with a simple piece of geometry in Maya 2008.

It's a Subd plane. I combined an EP curve and the geometry using the Extrude command. I switched to Polygon mode from the Marking Menu and began pushing & pulling on the cage's vertices. No big deal. I am able to expand the geometry to match the underlying Image Plane.

I repeated the same process two more times, using the same piece of geometry. Each time I would draw out another EP Curve and use the Extrude command to continue expanding the existing geometry. Everything works just fine, but before long, my geometry has what might be three separate poly cages and it gets kind of annoying after a while because it makes it hard to see what's going on.

This is where it becomes difficult... as you can see from the screenshot, the Outliner reveals that my polyToSubd geometry consists of three separate pieces of geometry (polyToSubdShapes) and now when I switch over to Polygon mode in the Marking Menu, I am able to move the poly cage's vertices on two of the poly Shapes independent of the original geometry! If that makes any sense. I pull on the vertices and the cage moves but the underlying geometry (Shape) does not. That's my first clue that something's wrong.

I don't want three separate pieces. Just the one I'm working with, but I can't seem to delete the others. If I delete one, they all disappear. Is there any relationship between the number of curves I have created (and eventually deleted) and the number of plyToSubdShapes that make up my polyToSubd plane?

In an earlier post, I was experiencing the same problem. I just assumed I had accidently duplicated a piece of geometry and the hidden one was poking up through the original geometry's surface. Now I suspect it was the polyToSubdShape that was poking through the surface.

A little help please.