From the course: Alias Essential Training

Using the History view - Alias Tutorial

From the course: Alias Essential Training

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Using the History view

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- In this video, I'm gonna show you another way that we can interrogate surfaces and also work with a little bit of the history view. So let's shade this up and this is a model that let's say somebody else created and I was handed the file. I'm curious of some of the elements in here. I'm curious of how they were created and what elements were used to create those particular entities. Let's go to wire frame and I'm particularly interested in this surface at the back for example. Now, I can see that it has some associativity because this fillet and this fillet light up pink. I look over here in the control panel and it's been relabeled Just_Another_Surface. So how was it created? Was it a revolve? Was it a sweep? Or was it skin? So because it's got history, one way I could do this very simply would be to go to query edit, hue and now I can see that it's the Skin Control. Now, there are other options for this. What we can do is go up to this H icon, next to Workspaces, click it one time and this opens up something called the History View. Right now it's listing all of the elements that are contained on my modeled space right now, and if I open up the arrow beneath that it gives me more details about each element. I'm only interested in this one element so if you have a model with a lot of entities this can get very confusing. All I'm gonna do now, go to List and move over to Active so now it's only listing the active element which is this skin. You can see by the label here that it tells you that it was a SKINTOOL: and then what it's been renamed as, Just_Another_Surface. So, again, I've got an indication of what was being used to create that. Also, the elements used within that skin are cirlce4, 3, 2 and the circle at the bottom. I can also open up or re-invoke the skin command simply by clicking the icon one time and that will open up that command as well. Another very cool feature about this is if you're still working on this area here, I can go ahead and do a rebuild and I could Suspend Selected. Now, if you get an error like that you have to make sure that you select the element and then say Suspend Selected. Okay, now we have a strike through the H here that's basically telling us that the history for this has been temporarily frozen. So now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go ahead and pick this element here and I'm gonna go to the Scale function. Let's just scale that up a little bit. Now, you can see that the actual skin command still goes pink. It's still telling me that it's associated to this particular entity. Now come out of that command after the scale. You can see that the skin doesn't update but that's because the history has been suspended. So let's go ahead. Let's pick this now and I can go back up to rebuild and I can go to resume and now this skin will update with the new scale version of that circle. Even if I don't have anything selected I can still go to Resume and it will rebuild all of the entities that I have in there so if you've tweaked three or four different entities but you only want one particular one to update make sure that you select that and then just do a resume on that particular entity.

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