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Some Maya issues

interpolator
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huffer interpolator
I've been using Maya for about 6 months now, coming from 3dsmax, and I have a couple of issues and questions that I desperately need fixes:

1. Rotation gizmo in ortho views is greyed out on some part, what purpose this has? I can't rotate while clicking on the gray part of the gizmo. Somtimes, there is no grayed out part, but rotation doesnt work unless I click guess on another part of the gizmo.

rotation1.jpg

2. When using Isolate mode, I can still select the hidden faces, rendering the mode useless in a lot of cases (when cutting polygons for instance, I have to detach the faces I want to cut to avoid hitting invisible faces).

isolation1.jpg

3. Related, Hide unselected with a subobject selected hides everything, so if I'm modeling and need a better view, I have to go to object mode, lose my selection, hide what I need to hide, go back to my object. Hide selection works if you're in subobject moded on the other hand.

4. When doing bevels, the inner bevels get assigned default Lambert1, instead of the applied material, any way to keep the material assigned to the mesh?

5. If I import objects, they get renamed with a ":" in their name, and I can't use some operations on them (like froxnormal export, or some scripts). Any way to change the default name structure for imported meshes?

6. After many uses of Focus and the Viewcube in Ortho views, sometimes viewport clipping kicks in, and mesh is like a cut-away, I'm unable to select everything. I have to create a new Ortho view, or change viewport clipping settings, also Viewcube dissapears, even If I create a new ortho, so I can't go to left or front view without going into another default Ortho and use the Viewcube there.

7.If Cameras are hidden and I hide something, using Display - Geometry - Show all also shows the cameras again, even though there's a separate Show Cameras just below.

8. Any way to have a history for last locations like in Max? The last paths show every folder in the path going up to the root instead of the last folder you saved or opened from.

9. Sometimes if I use undo more than a couple of times, object dissapears, doin Redo doesn't work anymore (no available redos)

10. Sometimes there's this freeze issue where:
- I have to rotate or pan the viewport so subobject selections get updated
- I can't close Maya from x, nothing happens
- can't select UV's sometimes
So I have to kill the Maya process. Saving works, but it doesn't update the path on the window title bar if you save by a new name.

11. If I'm working with instances and I'm doing an extrude, the gizmo appears on a random instance instead of the one I'm working on.

12. Sometimes If I use Extrude on a mesh as a Shell Modifier Equivalent, vertex move wildly around. I have to import in 3dsmax, apply shell, reimport.

13. Any easy way to cut polygouns in the middle of the face, like Cut tool in max? I use Split polygons and uncheck Constrain to Edges when I need to cut inside a face, then reenable it to finish the cut on an edge, but the big problem is:

14. When autosave kicks in, operation you're on is cancelled, you lose your work if you're cutting a polygon or you get interrupted if you're selecting.

15. Sometimes when interactively creating a mesh in an ortho view, the drag method is all wonky, and the starting corner of a cube for instance moves after you clicked (I think I encountered this more in 2013).

16. Anyway to prevent non-manifold meshes from happening? I have a mesh made of two sub-meshes, some vertices overlap, after I duplicate the mesh for Symmetry, I want to weld the middle vertices. If I select them and weld, they get welded together from the different sub-meshes, creating one big mesh with non-manifold geometry. Instead, I have to select one half from one sub-mesh, then the other half, convert to vertices, weld, then repeat for the other sub-mesh. Sometimes I forget about this and welding screws up my mesh. I have to undo, but then the mesh dissapears - undo/redo bug described above.


17. If I want to select close-packed subobjects, I can't select anything that is underneath the move gizmo (it just selects one of the axis), so I have to either zoom in alot, deselect, and plan my selection so the gizmo is not in the way, or select in select mode, no gizmos.


That's it for now. I'm using Maya 2014, I know some things are better in 2015 (like the multi-cut tool), but I have to stick to 2014 for a while.

Replies

  • Bartalon
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    Bartalon polycounter lvl 12
    1. The grey ring is a reference point for the rotation axis orientation. In perspective mode its a sphere that all the rings wrap around. In an ortho view, the axis from which you are viewing overlaps with that grey ring.

    2. This is a bug that's been there for several versions of Maya. It often crops up when using the Split Polygon Tool and other tools that interact with the edges along the isolated area.

    3. Seems to be a bug, but I don't use Hide Unselected. Isolate Selection works for me most times.

    4. Bevels should adopt the material you have on your mesh as long as lambert1 is not one of those materials.

    5. Can't offer any solutions, sorry

    6. Check your camera near/far clip values. Select the appropriate camera and adjust the fields in the Attribute Editor.

    7. Try using Polygon Surfaces instead of All.

    8. There should be a dropdown arrow at the top of the file browser address that displays all folder hierarchy. There is also File > Recent Files... and in the preferences menu (Display, Settings/Preferences > Preferences > Files/Projects category) you can define the starting folder.

    9. Sometimes if you are isolated using undo/redo Maya doesn't properly place the object back inside the isolate view. If the object is vanishing entirely from the scene, regularly deleting construction history should prevent this in most cases.

    10. Never encountered this problem, might be hardware related.

    11. The transformation handle tends to appear at the original version of the instance rather than the one you are working on.

    12. Try using the Thickness field instead of pulling out by Z.

    13. Depends on how you need to add verts. Edit Mesh > Poke Face will add a vertex at the center. If you need to manually drag new points, Split Polygon Tool (not the Interactive Split Tool) works pretty well.

    14. I think saving manually resets the autosave timer. I could be wrong. Other than that you'll just have to deal with some tools getting interrupted for the purpose of possibly saving your ass :P

    15. Not sure I understand this one. Maybe you're moving your mouse before you release the button, causing the side to shift.

    16. Use the viewport menu Shading > Backface Culling to hide the inside of your mesh from rendering. This will help you see if a polygon gets flipped in the wrong direction, usually when extruding edges backward. Also enable border edges in your Preferences (Display category, Polygons: Highlight Border Edges check box)

    Also you can use Mesh > Cleanup to search for nonmanifold geometry.

    17. You can't direct-select components through the gizmo in Maya, but marquee selections still work. Hold Ctrl + Shift to "add to" your current selection. Switching to the select tool is usually the easiest way to deal with it.
  • JoakimMellergard
    5. What you get is scenename:objectname. Do you need to import maya files? .fbx and maybe other formats won't give you this problem.

    If you do need maya files you can use this script I wrote to rename selected objects from scenename:objectname to objectname after import. And if you wanted to you could actually create your own importer which does this automatically on import.

    import maya.cmds as cmds
    selection = cmds.ls(sl=True)

    for each in selection:
    if ":" in each:
    splittedName=each.split(":")
    print splittedName
    cmds.rename(each, splittedName[1])
  • throttlekitty
    2/3: I'm with Bartalon on that one.

    5: This is the result of namespaces, it's under the import options, and controls for for your scene are in Window>General>Namespace Editor. It's in place to keep naming local for each object, since Maya can only have one name for anything in a scene. A scene with multiple characters that need to retain their bone names for export later, for example.

    10: I've gotten this a few times, no fix that I'm aware of, drivers maybe.

    12: Super annoying, it typically happens if nearby edges are flowing differently than their neighbors. If Thickness/Offset don't do what you want, you may need to do the extrude in multiple selections.

    15: I'd love a fix for this.
  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    throttlekitty: Thanks, I'll see what I can do with the Namespace editor. At issue #12, I always use Thickness, and only encountered the problem in this mode, I guess I'll have to continue being annoyed by this.

    JoakimMellergard: Thanks, very useful! :)

    Bartalon: Thanks for the answers, now some issues are fixed or more manageable!

    1. So it doesn't serve any purpose except being another bother (the gray overlap sometimes changes from object to object or viewport to viewport). Any chance to disable it?

    6. But why do all viewports end up screwed like that? :poly124: Can I prevent it? Everything's fine in the start, but after a couple of hours of work I realize my viewports are messed up and have to spend time fixing what shouldn't be an issue.

    8. Hmm, I noticed there's also a Recent Places list in the dropdown (just like in max), under the complete folder hierarchy (which was bothered me initially)

    13. Awesome, I found the option in the tool settings to cut in the middle of the face.

    Continued:

    18. Assigning vertex colors on decimated meshes is extremely slow (I use this method to bake color masks in xnormal) compared to 3dsmax: under a minute versus 20 minutes or more, and even if I assign the vertex colors in 3dsmax and import, it still takes 20 minutes or more to import the file with vertex colors.

    19. Related, working with decimated meshes is also extremely slow, for instance, deleting a sub-mesh from a 700k tris mesh will either take 15 minutes in Maya or freeze it (both in 2013 and 2014, any viewport renderers). Any lag in 3dsmax is under 30 seconds. Are there any performance options to fix this?
  • Bartalon
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    Bartalon polycounter lvl 12
    1. Yeah I'm not sure about disabling the grey part. You get used to it.

    6. If you are importing objects with obscenely large or small scales then the cameras may end up malfunctioning. Working in measurements other than centimeters could result in camera clipping issues in some instances.

    18. Try disabling construction history at the top of the Maya might help working with really high polygon meshes. The highlighted icon at the top of this image I found on Google Images:

    constructionHistory.png

    However I would simply recommend polypainting the color mask in ZBrush on your high res then decimate it with "Use and Keep Polypaint" on. Much easier. That option is found in Preferences > Decimation Master > Use and Keep Polypaint.

    19. Maya 2015 has drastically improved performance in Viewport 2.0. Handles polygons like a champ, though I'm not sure if that also speeds up importing massive files. Prior to 2015 though Maya tends to be pretty sluggish with millions of triangles in the scene.
  • Nox
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    Nox polycounter lvl 5
    Improved performance in Viewport 2.0 is GPU related while «deleting a sub-mesh» is calculated on CPU and in this area Maya is slower than Max, Modo, XSI. Nothing changed in 2015.
  • Bartalon
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    Bartalon polycounter lvl 12
    Thanks for the clarification Nox :)
  • claydough
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    claydough polycounter lvl 10
    re: 1. Gizmo greyed out.

    as pictured in your example...
    Once u choose an axis ( highlighted in yellow in your example )

    You can now rotate from "anywhere" in the viewport ( if rotating by positioning on the reference grey part is absolutely necessary fer some reason ) with the middle mouse button pressed instead of the left mouse button.

    Does that help?
  • throttlekitty
    I'm just going to hijack this thread. I've never actually done any architectural modeling before.

    20. I have one object with multiple materials/textures. Is there a decent way to only view faces assigned to the currently selected texture in the UV editor? "View Faces of Selected Images" loses the faces as soon as they're deselected.
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