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Controls how Maya displays a polygon mesh in the scene. The mesh can be displayed either un-smoothed, fully smoothed, or in
both modes simultaneously. The default setting is off. See Preview a smoothed polygonal mesh.
Note affects only the display of the polygon mesh in the scene view. If you render the mesh while is turned on the mesh will appear in its original un-smoothed state in the final image.
If you want the mesh to appear smoothed in a rendering you can convert the smooth preview to a smoothed polygon mesh using
Modify > Convert > Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons or to a subdiv proxy using Proxy > Subdiv Proxy.
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Determines the display mode for . Two display modes are possible:
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Press the 2 key to display the selected polygonal mesh in this mode. The original un-smoothed version of the mesh is displayed
in wireframe (cage) as well as a smoothed shaded preview version of the mesh simultaneously. The options lets you specify whether you can select and edit components on either of the separate versions of the mesh, or both,
by setting it to , , or .
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Press the 3 key to display the selected polygonal mesh in this mode. Only the smoothed preview version of the mesh is displayed
in this mode. You select and edit components on the smoothed preview when working in this mode.
Note
When editing components on the mesh in either preview mode, the transform manipulator always appears in the location of the
component as it appears on the original version of the mesh.
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Controls whether the subdivided components in the smoothed preview are displayed on the smoothed preview version of the mesh.
Subdivided components will be displayed when a check mark appears.
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Controls the number of times the original version of the mesh is subdivided (Default hotkeys: Page Up, Page Down). The slider
range is between 0 and 4. The default setting is 2. A value of 0 indicates no smoothing while a value of 4 is the highest
smoothing within the range of the slider. You can input values higher than 4 in the text field.
Note
Whenever a polygon mesh has an associated subdiv proxy object and the option is turned on, the Page Up and Page Down hotkeys will only control the smooth level on the subdiv proxy.
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Extra Controls
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Lets you set how you want creasing applied to boundary edges and vertices as you smooth the mesh.
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Applies no creasing to boundary edges and vertices.
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(Default) Applies full creasing to all boundary edges and all vertices that have only two incident edges before being converted
to a smooth mesh.
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Applies full creasing to edges only.
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Controls the amount of smoothness on the smooth mesh preview. The slider range is between 0 and 1. A value of 0 applies no
smoothing.
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Applies the same smoothing operation to the UV texture coordinates as occurs on the vertices. is on by default and provides better results for UV texture coordinates.
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Copies the edge hardness values from any hardened edges on the original mesh to the associated new edges on the . The default setting is off.
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Controls how UV borders are smoothed when the option is turned on.
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Border UVs are not smoothed.
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Internal UVs are smoothed. This is the default setting.
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All UV borders are smoothed.
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Specifies what components will remain unaffected by the .
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This option preserves the properties of border edges on the mesh.
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Preserves the properties of any existing manually hardened or softened edges.
Notes on Smooth Mesh Preview
- When the option for is set to you may want to change the active and inactive display colors for the to more easily differentiate between the cage and the smoothed versions of the mesh. Select Window > Settings/Preferences > Color Settings and then choose either the or tabs to set the related active and inactive color settings found in the Smooth Mesh Preview section of preferences window.
- If you turn on Smooth Mesh Preview for one or more meshes that contain 15,000 polygons each or more you are prompted with
the following message: "The selected mesh <object name> contains a large number of faces and may take a while to smooth or run out of memory. Do you want to continue with smooth
mesh preview?". This message indicates that the interactive performance may be affected if you proceed with using the on these high polygon count objects. There are a few ways you can modify the triggers for this warning.
If you want to set the default face limit to another value, for example: 20,000 polygons, you can type the following in the
command line:
optionVar -intValue smpSizeOfMeshForWarning 20000;
Alternatively you can disable the warning altogether by typing the following in the command line:
optionVar -intValue smpSizeWarningDisabledForAllPolys 1;
To re-enable the message, input the same command with a value of 0.
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