Possible to delete unused partial geometry of blendshapes?

[mostly_human]

I have a lot of high poly blendshapes and they are all from the same base model with blendshape weights painted to isolate different parts.  Is there anyway to delete the unused geometry on each blendshape (but still have it work as a blendshape) to get the project size down?

[Christoph_Schaedl]

If you use the new Shape Editor there should only be one Object.

[zewt · Accepted solution]

If you have meshes in the scene for the blend shape targets, just delete them.  They aren't needed, and haven't been needed for a really, really long time (Maya 2016?  maybe 2015?).  Regular blend shapes are just stored on the blendShape node.

Some dated importers like FBX will still create separate meshes for each blendShape, but all you have to do is delete the meshes.

[mostly_human]

thank you, zewt. I knew the actual meshes are no longer needed but I
assumed that maya stored the entire mesh for each blendshape internally
based on the file size but perhaps it’s smarter about it and only stores
the vertex deltas