Maya Unit/Grid setup :)

[Rick_D]

Does anybody know where to set up your grid sizes - I set it to feet a month or two ago and totally forgot where I need to go to change it - I want to set it to the default but it'd be nice to know where to go to change these things. I keep having to set the camera draw distance right up (anyone know how to set that up so it always stays at what I set it to?) each time I load maya up.

Thanks in advance for your help 'core

[hessi]

you have to use the hotbox icon next to the grid label.

main menu -> display -> grid hotbox

[] <- click this icon next to the textlabel (grid)

then you can set up the grid as you want.

[Rick_D]

mhm thanks for trying but I don't see a measurement in there, I've been in that menu before :S

I'm just going to have to google moar

[Rick_D]

windows -> settings/preferences -> preferences -> settings (unit measurements)

finally

Don't know when the hell I changed it but I did and it's annoying and you should never ever change it

[Warby]

this is a completely new cup of tea for me so far i toughed maya purposefully stayed away from any real life measurements and only had "UNITS" which directly translate 1 to 1 to any unit another application or game might use ?! apparently i was wrong ...

when i woke up this morning i was a happier human being

[Rick_D]

Yeah it's default measurement is cm, there's a few reasons for this but this is a decent read:

Maya functions in UNITS, and treats the default Maya unit as 1 Unit = 1 Centimeter. Maya has user preferences that allow this unit to be changed from cm to meter, inches, feet, kilometer, and so on. Never ever ever change this preference! Always leave Maya set to cm as the working unit, which is the default.

Drawbacks to changing the default unit==> Changing the default will cause numerous problems including, but not limited to: Light and camera icons will appear hundreds of times smaller than usual, making selecting and working with them difficult and while they can be scaled without affecting brightness, scaling area light icons does affect brightness. Dynamics will still operate in centimeters and with some components scaling and others not: the result is chaos and unpredictable behavior. Best to adjust dynamic scale values to what is needed rather than the entire scene's unit. Path constraints can return erroneous unexpected not-to-scale values, and worse.

It is, however, usually important to build scenes to scale to one another especially if models from one will ever interact with another. Just ensure your minds all understand what 1 Maya unit equals in terms of perceived measurement units. That is, while you never want to change Maya's preferences from cm to something else, you can simply treat 1 Maya Unit as equaling 1 meter or 10 meters or 5 feet or whatever makes sense to you given Maya's constraints. Maya tends to prefer scenes be built fairly small, so if you're building enormous buildings or starships you may want to treat 1 Unit as equal to 10 meters or more.

Remember this isn't a setting you make in Maya, it's just something you know and model by. If you need your skyscraper to be one kilometer high, and you use a 1 unit = 10 meters scheme, then you'd enter 100 in the box's height attribute.

For ZAON starship models, we use 1 Maya Unit (1 cm) = 4 Meters, 10 Meters, or even in extreme cases as much as 100 Meters, depending on type. 4m to the Unit is often best for ships under 200m in length, and 10m per unit is best for ships ranging from 200m to several kilometers in length. Just remember for sure to resize any ships with Scale command if you need to import them into a shared scene with ships using a different scale. When working on really large ships of several kilometers (several hundred Maya units) it can be handy to resize your grids to extend beyond the surfaces you're working with and to appropriate subdivisions. For really small scenes you can shrink your grids. By default your grid displays one grid subdivision per Maya unit (1 cm). But be aware that changing your grids will carry over when you start a new scene because these grid settings are retained as part of your GUI preferences and you may need to change them back to fit a smaller ship. This, along with the grid on/off option for the viewport panel, are the main culprits behind the "what happened to my grids?" problem. Grid size can be set in Display|Grid[OptionBox]. Grid display on/off options in your viewport panel are set via the Panel's menu: Show|Grid.

For character modeling it's wise to model at true world units, leaving Maya set to the default cm. This means that a 6' tall character would be just over 180cm (180 Maya units) high. The reason for this is that many advanced Maya tools expect this size. For example, the cloth solver would create unrealistically stiff clothing on a character that was only 18 units high instead of 180.

So it seems there is a lot more reliant on the units than just the size of your grid, as I said when I bumped it up to feet my far clipping plane was way too close and various other issues I would no doubt have found out when I started doing more advanced stuff :S

[hessi]

this is a completely new cup of tea for me so far i toughed maya purposefully stayed away from any real life measurements and only had "UNITS" which directly translate 1 to 1 to any unit another application or game might use ?! apparently i was wrong ...

when i woke up this morning i was a happier human being

i bet this is just a placebo measuring. the vertex lists of course only save 1:1

these options might be usefull for those people who want to use more physical stuff. maybe dynamics.

for todays game development you dont have to care about cm/inch/what ever. just use the default and be happy.