## Collapsing Creators & Modifiers Sometimes — in fact quite often — you’ll want to “collapse” creators or modifiers into editable meshes, in other words create an editable mesh with no creators or modifiers that is built from a modified or created “virtual” mesh. Probably the most common example of this is collapsing a symmetry modifier prior to rigging and animating a character. Another common reason is that you want to modify the mesh in specific ways that simply cannot be accomplished by applying more modifiers or adjusting parameters. ### Partially Collapsing Creators and Modifiers Sometimes — again, quite often — you’ll want to collapse some modifiers or creators but not others. E.g. you might have a character model that has Symmetry and Subdivision modifiers, and you need to collapse symmetry (to rig and animate it) but you don’t want to collapse subdivision because it will make it much harder to tweak the mesh later. Simply drag the modifiers you want to keep out of harm’s way (e.g. to the scene root), collapse the stuff you want to collapse, then drag them back in. It’s a little clumsy, but it works. ### Keeping the modifier chain around for later Let’s suppose you have a character model you’d like to rig and animate, but you’re not certain you won’t want to go back and tweak the model later. You might want to keep the original modifier chain (and the original mesh) around for later (in the same file even) but not have it mess up your renders. All you need to do is copy the root node, paste it back into your document, and then in its **Mode** tag toggle off the “Visible in editor” and “Visible in renderer” settings. Now you can’t see it (or select it) but it’s still around if you need it. This trick can be used for anything, of course.