Two or three newbie questions

[mmurray4835]

Hi, I've recently started using Maya an I have a fee questions. 

First: I've watched a lot of how-to videos and in a lot at some point they will freeze transformations and delete the history but I've never heard an explanation of why or when you do this.

2nd.: I'm working on a model of a guitar amp I used to have and I can't find a good image of the front speaker cover so I took a pic of my current amp to use but the image is way too big. The amp would have to be ten feet tall for it to be proportional. Is there any way in Maya to scale, etc, an image? In Lightwave, that I've been using you can scale and move an image map to fit.

Finally I have a Maya to Substance Painter back to Maya and Arnold question: I  set up my shaders in Maya, exported to Painter, did the texturing and exported textures. The problem is Painter generated a gazillion texture files and many of them appear to be identical. Did I do something wrong or is this how. Painter works.

Thanks for the help.

Michael

[Anonymous]

Question 1

Freezing the transformation resets the translations and rotations back to 0 while resetting scale back to 1 on the selected object as if it were a new poly object while keeping all the translations, rotations and scaling you've made.

It doesn't actually change anything visually, You can see all of this in the channel box play around move, rotate, and scale a cube then freeze transformation

Deleting history helps to prevent crashing in Maya and may be useful if Maya is running slow. Lets say you've extruded a face multiple times, beveled edges, made cuts, etc. Maya keeps track of all of this history and you can see the changes you've made in both the channel box and attribute editor so if you wanted to go back and tweak them you can. Deleting the history gets rid of all of that.

Question 2

The only way I know how to scale an image in Maya is if you use image plane, if you have go into the camera settings which will open up the attribute editor.

In there you will see a tab named imagePlaneShape1 click on that and open the placement drop down menu

In the placement drop down menu you can change the size (how big or small you want the image), offset(move left or right), depth(zoom), and rotation

I've included an image to help, as for the substance painter issue I'm not aware on how to help you out on but good luck!

[mmurray4835]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.