Maya units / scale

rebel

Hey guys, Im trying to wrap my head around the scale in maya.
Im settings up some renders and want to try to get a handle on the scale of my scene.

Does changing the units under preferences, only change the size of the grid? And not the relative size of objects in the scene?

Also, when i set units to say - inches, does that mean that each
square on the grid is one inch? How does that relate to primitive 'units', say I make a cube at 1x1x1 unit, that isn't 1 inch?

Bartalon

All objects should adjust to the size of your scale settings. If you switch your scale settings, you should see any primitives with initial construction history change their height, width, and depth. A 1x1x1 cm cube would change to .01 x .01 x .01 meters. If you had a 1m by 1m cube and switched to centimeters, your cube will be 100cm by 100cm.

As for the grid, you will need to go into the options to configure what each grid line and subdivision is. Personally I change the color of my minor grid lines so I can more easily pick out the major divisions. I think the default colors are both the same shade of grey which doesn't help.

Maya does not have generic units like Max does, so your geometry will always be measurable in some metric or imperial format.

rebel

Thank you for the reply Bartalon,
So, ive set it back to the default of cm units. Im using Vray, so I thought I should probably have things are proper scale, so that lights and shadows react realistically (im not sure how important this is).

However, in Maya, with cm being units - if I make a room/character to real life scale with the cm units. They seem huge in maya, the camera manipulator is tiny in relation, lights need to be scaled up a ton, and the clipping plane isnt far enough - which makes me think that im doing somethin wrong.

Anyone have suggestions on this?