Maya Station

When I move a joint, its parent changes orientation

You are trying to position joints in your scene with the Move tool, and you notice that Maya is changing the orientation of the selected joint's parent joint.

Retrieve polygon components in the order they are selected

Maya 2012 provides a feature that allows a selection of polygon components to be retrieved in the order they were selected. This is in addition to the sorted selection that you may be more familiar with. 

In order to perform a selection-order query on your polygon components, you will need to first enable the "Track selection order" setting in Settings/Preferences > Selection.

 

Then you can use the flag -orderedSelection in your query to list the components in the order they were selected:

ls -orderedSelection;

Note that if the option "Track selection order" is disabled this command will return a sorted list, and the result will be the same as if you were using ls -selection;

Thanks to Tim Fowler for pointing this out, as I'd completely missed this feature when Maya 2012 was released.

Owen

 

How many shells in a UV set ?

There is currently no MEL command to find the number of shells in a given UV set (I'm pretty sure of it).

Either way, new to Maya 2011 is an API method that identifies which UVs belong to which shell, and the total number of shells for a given UV set, and this post provides a short example of how to roll it into a python script.

 

Artisan does not display deformer weights on selected surface.

You are using the Artisan paint tool to interactively modify deformer weights, such as cluster weights, on a NURBS surface. You expect Maya to display the deformer weights on your selected surface in greyscale or with color values, but apart from the outline of the brush you see no color feedback whatsoever.

The reason Maya skips the display of your deformer weights is because of a property that has been set on your surface object.

Need to know which polygon shell contains a given face ?

You can use polygon Selection Contraints rules to automatically expand your selection to the entire shell that surrounds your selected component.

My problem with using this method in a script, and then querying the new selection, is that I prefer to avoid changing the current selection in the middle of a script.

Instead I use the following command, which returns the members of a shell from a single faceID: polySelect.

Error: Cannot change topology

Users would get this error in some of their models when they trying to create their UV maps.
// Error: Cannot change topology, poly mesh has allowTopologyModification attribute set to false //

The solution, is to make sure that the Allow Topology Mod is turned on under the shape node of your mesh.

Instance your LOD groups

Ever tried instancing an LOD group? Well, you'll get some unexpected results if you use the Duplicate Special > Instance option (which would seem to be the way to go)....your instanced LODs will swap at the same time regardless of how far they are from the camera. In fact, they all seem to ape the original LOD group...

Maya 2011 Highlight - Modeling and general workflow improvements (Part 1)

A short movie that shows some of the new modeling related features and options in Maya 2011

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/stevenr/maya_2011_highlight_modeling_and_general_workflow_improvements

Increasing the hardware texture resolution

In some occasions , one would like to increase the default hardware texture display found under the Shader node

The following MEL can do just that
setAttr file1.resolution 1024;

where file1 is the name of the file texture node.

 

How to add a shape node under a transform node

Sometimes shapes can get disconnected from their transform, this can happen accidently or not.  To reparent the shape simply;

1) Open the Outliner

2) Select the shape you want to reparent

3) Press the CTRL key and select the transform node

4) Open the script editor and type in parent -s

This will reparent the shape node under the transform