Maya to Max scale issues

nitzmoff

I'm using Maya 8 and Max 9 and am having problems getting things consistent scale wise between the two.

So far, setting both to use centimeters and having the grid run at a centimeter each on both does indeed work. And that was fine until we began character work and realized that the clipping plane in Max is fubared and doesn't allow you to to mess with the near clip plane nearly as much as the far. So animation is a bit impossible and now I'd like to scale everything up by 100. Thus the grid would be spaced every 100 centimeters. But in doing so with both, objects brought into Max are huge and I can't seem to figure out why.

Anyone know the 'trick' to this or a functional way to hack Max's clipping planes?

Thanks.

Eric Chadwick

Max has a utility called Rescale World Units, but rigs don't respond well to it.

Are you using the viewport clipping planes, yellow triangles on the side? Or are you using a Camera's clipping planes? The latter might offer more control, though you have to sacrifice some ease of interaction using a Camera instead of Perspective.

nitzmoff

Yeah I was using the yellow triangles on the side. We've used ones on a camera for the time being and it's not ideal for full on production. It seems so silly that Max doesn't allow numeric value entry for the viewports.

Eric Chadwick

There might be script support for those, or in the SDK if you're adventurous. Better to work out scale issues before starting a project, but yeah I've been in your boat too before, only it wasn't Maya.

Rob Galanakis

Well it is easy to set the camera clipping planes via MaxScript:
<camera>.nearclip Float

so you'd type "$Camera01.nearclip = 0.0"

However I have NO idea how to do this for the viewport, since Max, unlike Maya, doesn't treat Viewports as generic cameras. This has been the bane of many people... I will check around for you since I know this issue of Max's wonky-ness at small sizes is a problem for many.