Is there a way to keep the primitive polygons from mutating so badly after transforming them just slightly?

So Maya lets you create various polygonal primitive forms, and you can change their properties via the channel editor, really cool feature but it breaks very easily. For example if you create a cylinder and scale it slightly, and then try to change its edge segments, you will end up with some volatile monstrosity.

I really like this procedural feature, as I can get a lot out of a generic form like a cylinder but am also finding myself just fighting it. For example, I just spent 10 minutes mass blocking in the masses of a castle, assuming I will fine tune the primitives am using after I finish blocking in, but after scaling them around, that feature basically broke and I was forced to just delete history.

Is this feature really this brittle or am missing a critical step that I need to take to ensure they remain working? I tried to freeze transforms but it did not help.

Also, I would like to know, do you guys use this feature?

That should not happen for ordinary transform scaling, so the fact it is in your video suggests your scale mode is not set to object. Scaling objects in any axis space other than their local object means that their components must be edited to make it work so, while those other spaces are fine for move and rotate, it’s best to leave your Scale manip on Object, and this shouldn’t happen.

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Just got back to Maya, you was right, my scale pivot orientation defaulting to something else and not “object”, damn…

Thank you.