Maya’s “pasted_” is history and maya root namespace.

PASTED_

In maya the copy paste feature can be really useful. The major downside however is that every node that gets pasted gets a nice:

PASTED_ prefix attached to it. Resulting in a horribly messy scene that no one ever cares to clean up… until you have to revisit the scene and have to dive into the world of pasted_ nodes trying to find the correct shader etc.

Now there is a really easy fix for it:

In your maya instalation directory there is a file called cutCopyPaste.mel (of course thanks autodesk … )

in that is a function called pasteScene()

replace that function with the following code:

This will merge all the pasted nodes directly into the scene (root namespace ) without adding any prefix or suffix. (Only when the node all ready exists in the same depth it will add a number to the end).

Root Namespace

Whenever I loaded in a referenced scene maya would create a namespace (either with an normal namespace or it would prefix the nodes with the filename and an underscore). However Autodesk has finally been nice enough to open the functionality in the UI to load a scene into the root namespace (making sure the referenced scene does not get any weird naming or namespace. Making it easier to work with)

When going to File > Create reference

The trick is not to disable namespaces on load but enabling them and selecting the : ( root )  namespace and set the following option:

Merge into selected namespace and rename …

Geometry influence on skin cluster explodes, the devil is in the details.

A while ago I tried to deform one geometrical object with another. The source object would deform by using the blend shapes and the target object should deform accordingly. Unfortunately as soon as I would activate the blendshape the target mesh completely exploded.

After a while I figured out that Maya doesn’t like small faces very much an creates floating point errors in the calculation. Seeing as I dint have any access to the code with the Maya api I decided to look for a simple workaround.
Simply up scaling the model solved the problem. But as long as you either have a lamina face or a face that has a surface of a decimal number the geometry influence will explode.