Advanced Subd Poly Converter 1.1.0 for Maya (maya script)

New in 1.1:

• Compiled for 8.0 x64 and 8.5 x64 for Windows.
• Compiled for 7.0, 8.0, 8.5, 8.0 x64 and 8.5 x64 for Linux.
• Compiled for 7.0, 8.0 and 8.5 for OSX.

• Ability to specify custom smoothing angle for polygonal meshes.
• A fix for Maya's subd display bug on 8.0 and 8.5 when wires are turned off. Script fixes that by temporarily activating ghosting for subd shapes..

For my own workflow I prefer clean Subdivision Surfaces over any Poly Smooth Proxy analogs.
It's just much faster while tweaking and the scene is much cleaner in the end.
Every conversion to Subd and back actually works as an implicit clean up for correct topology and valid geometry of the mesh.

Unfortunately native maya converter didn't support many features that make this workflow pleasant so I sat down and wrote a little helper for myself. With time it has grown up to what you can see here.
The workflow for me pretty much mimics the one of Lightwave or Modo. Mesh is toggled from Subd to Poly, by hitting the ~ hotkey. Selections are preserved between subds and polygons. Plus I've added a lot of little automations that simplify the conversion to subd mesh. Script automatically finds the invalid geometry that may prevent converting. Invalid geometry is selected and you can use the automatic fix for most cases.

Also this tool addresses some of maya bugs connected with Subdivisions Surface conversion. Like famous undo bug where you end up with both poly and subd shape is fixed with this converter.

In all I'm not using hierarchical Subdivisions for what they are, just their power and speed as a great replacement for slow and bloated Smooth proxy solutions.

Main features:

• Script works as a toggler, both hilited and selected objects get converted.
• Preserves object/s name/s.
• Preserves instancing (as on the gif animation).
• Converts component selection between subd and polygon mesh/es and vice versa.
• Preserves sets.
• An option to fix UV that could be cut after converting from subd back to poly. Script performs a mergeUv's with a very little tolerance to fix that.
• Script can turn off wireframe display when converting single object to subd, letting you to evaluate the model better. The wireframes are back once you convert back to polygon.
• Script automatically checks the geometry for correct topology. If you have any non manifold or lamina geometry the pop up window will be displayed suggesting you to perform an automatic clean up. Name of the object with a problem will be displayed, and problem vertices selected.
• Checks for the inner vertices that are connected to less than 3 edges (another problem that won't allow the conversion). In this case the script again pops up a window selecting the bad vertices, You have the option to delete them with the "Just delete" button or quit and perform a manual fix.
• Script performs cleaner conversion, the history of the polygon object is deleted first making sure no trash nodes are left behind.
• Script has no bug with undo, you can convert and undo without having a subd and polygon shape together (very famous maya convertors bug).
• Converts the selection mask for components. So if you had a vertex selection mask for subd's convertor will switch the polygon mask to vertex as well.
• Converting an object with more than one shapes does the following: Convertor converts the first shape of the object; The rest of the shapes are deleted. This allows converting meshes with errors in a cleaner way (maya's convert won't convert them at all).
• Converts the subd in proxy mode back to polygons preserving the polygon selections.