Well, when targets are deleted Maya is not storing points position anymore, but only deltas of the affected vertices. That is: from now on, every change applied to the origShape (as long as vertex count and indexing remain untouched) will not be overridden by the blendShape node, but just added up. This makes the workflow incredibly smooth, since you don't need to remodel all the BS at this point. If you need to correct any of them, you just have to trigger it on, duplicate the mesh. sculpt the edits and plug it back into the bs node (and delete it ;) )
Plus, using my script i've noticed that often Maya (probably because of some floating-point, double-precision data related issue) saves a lot of junk deltas, whose value is approximable to zero. So I wrote another script to get rid of deltas with a length smaller than a certain threshold, and by doing that the file shrank by 100 mb more. Furthermore, the overall number of deltas removed is something around four millions, which definitely means a lot less computation for Maya. So at the end of the day, my file is at least 800 mb smaller, the scene is faster, and i have the power to change my base mesh whenever i want without bothering too much about reshaping the targets. And lastly, yes! I was trying to rebuild tens of shapes at millions of polygons each using Python. It is not the fastest way, but I wanted to be able to do it using the APIs only. Let's say it is part of a self-imposed learning plan! This is my approach to the question, because i need this level of freedom. Referencing the targets is also another great way to keep you scene light, but I prefer to avoid referencing since i believe it is weak and dangerous. I know it is necessary when animating, but yet i would try to reduce it as much as possible (thus having no references before the rigging file)! Enrico -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Programming for Autodesk Maya" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/python_inside_maya/9e727008-02bf-4658-b69f-c2daddf01109%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
