unitConversion, I curse thee!

[nonquad]

I have this recurring problem, where the maya hypergraph refuses to show unitConversion nodes. Removing them from the "hide" list of auxiliary nodes doesn't seem to help, nor does "show auxiliary nodes".

The unitconversions show up only ONCE for me, the first time a connection is made. On any subsequent graphing, they are shown only as greyed out connections, which (annoyingly) give a "nothing selected" error message if I try to select and delete them. For a graph geek like myself, this is a supreme insult!

Luckily, at first glance maya 5 doesn't seem to have this problem. But I'm stuck using 4.5 on the project I'm working on. So how, I ask you, how can I tame the wiley unitConversion nodes, and force them to submit to direction? Does anyone know?

[warpcat]

Maya shows those gray connections when it has "condenced" several nodes together, to make things "easier for you to see". I feel your pain. In the past, I could turn on the "auxilary nodes", and see them just fine. Now, doing some tests, there appears to be nothing I can do to make them show up in the Hypergraph. Very odd. However, if your goal is to actually select them, you can always do it with mel:
select -r unitConversion1; (or whaterver)
Also, if you turn on auxilary nodes in the Outliner, you should be able to see select them there as well. I agree, annoying, and weird.

[nonquad]

Yeah. That's what I've been doing; selecting with mel.

There's actually another level of suckiness: mousing over a condensed unitConversion linkage doesn't necessarily report the actual name of the uC node.
Like, if I individually connect the x, y, and z rotation channels of two transforms, 3 uC's are created -- but the hypergraph shows 3 condensed links all describing themselves as uC1!! So the only way to figure out the actual uC's involved, is to listConnected. Quite a headache, considering Maya only condenses the graph to try to make things "easier" in the first place.

For reference, the reason I run into this problem, is I'll often use math nodes to correlate two transforms. So the transform data is converted on the way into the math node, and converted again on the way out. Since the conversion involves changes of magnitude, and floating point numbers only carry so much resolution, I sometimes find myself losing of accuracy if I don't manually set the uC factors to 1.

Anyway. The graphing problem is just a nuisance... it'd still be nice if there were a way to fix it properly.

[joojaa]

Well isnt it a wonderfull world the more you know the more you want maya to do absolutely no deductions. On the otherhand the less you do the more stumped you are that maya doesent do it!

Its a tradeoff

[campbell]

arg. i know this one well. fuggin annoying. no solution, sorry.

[macaronikazoo]

have u tried using the hypershade? it always seems to display unit conversions for me. at least i think it does. i don't usually bother with them.

[nonquad]

I hadn't thought of that. Good idea!