As you work in Maya, most of your actions create nodes in the construction history of the objects you work on. At each point in your work, the current scene is the result of all the nodes you’ve created so far.
For example, you can revolve a curve around a centerpoint to create a new surface with a cross-section in the shape of the curve. When you apply this action to the curve, a new revolve node is created. The new node has the shape of the curve as an input. It has attributes that control how it creates the surface from the curve. And it has the resulting surface as its output.
This chain of nodes, from the curve to the revolve node to the surface, is called the surface’s construction history. The most important thing about construction history is that you can change it, by editing node attributes and the connections between nodes. You can reshape the curve, or change the attributes on the revolve node, and the resulting surface updates automatically.
Construction history is part of the dependency graph in Maya. While construction history refers to the history of actions that created the scene, the entire dependency graph refers to all connections (input and output) between nodes.
Some common uses of the construction history:
- Edit the transform attributes of a node in the Attribute Editor or Channel Box.
- Change dependency relationships between node attributes in the Hypergraph or Node Editor.
- Make some nodes inactive while you focus on editing others.
- Delete all or part of the construction history of an object or an animation to "bake" it in the current state. Doing so can reduce a scene's recalculation time and file size, but it can also change object appearance by simplifying a sequence of operations. See the To To delete the construction history, below.
To turn construction history creation off or on
Click the
Construction History On/Off icon
in the
Status line (toolbar).
To delete the construction history
Select > History.