Maya units

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Mathaeus
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Maya units

Post by Mathaeus » 01 Dec 2015, 13:55

So, in short, what units are preferred by Maya people, when it comes to characters. Default seems to be centimeter, while for Maya nucleus, including nCloth, it seems to be meter - one should adjust some global nucleus parameter to get it to work nicely together with default centimeter. Somehow, "our" decimeter looking like a nice midpoint, in Maya too.
Anyway, I'd be still interested, is there a recommended unit for characters, or, what majority of people use.

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Rork
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Re: Maya units

Post by Rork » 01 Dec 2015, 19:56

I keep it cm. Some stuff in Maya, like XGen seems to default to cm. This only will result in large, scaled characters/etc. when dealing with dynamics.

rob

p.s. I'm slightly over three weeks in with a complicated Maya project, and already have seen most of the bugs one can encounter. Some dating back to 2007!
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Daniel Brassard
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Re: Maya units

Post by Daniel Brassard » 02 Dec 2015, 15:12

Hi Mathaeus,

It depend of what will be the final result of your character animation and where it will fit in your pipeline.

Things to consider are:

* Will Maya animation be integrated into real plate/physical environment or sent to a game engine?
* Is the Character model coming from another software (Softimage, 3DMax, Mudbox) or strictly from Maya?
* Is the character to be subjected to dynamic constrains such as fall/drop , bounce, etc.

In general, I leave the scale of Maya to the default cm but model everything to scale if it will be in a real physical environment or subjected to dynamic forces.

I will model to scale if:
* the character will be lit with physically based lights/IES
* The character fits in a pipeline with other software (Softimage, 3DMax, Houdini, Modo, etc.). The pipeline will dictate the scale of the character
* The character will be rendered via physically based rendering or use HDRI
* the animation is to fit in a simulation or subjected to gravity (fall, thrown, kick, floating) or if Bifrost, ncloth, Syflex are used
* To avoid issue with weight painting (low precision weight especially i.e .0001)
* To match camera focal length and other characteristics
* To match real world textures, bump or normal map
* To avoid issues with scaled bevel that catch lights on hard surfaces. If you scale after you applied bevels, the bevel may be too large of too small. In Maya bevel is .5 unit by default.

Food for thoughts. Good luck!
Last edited by Daniel Brassard on 02 Dec 2015, 19:12, edited 1 time in total.
$ifndef "Softimage"
set "Softimage" "true"
$endif

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Mathaeus
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Re: Maya units

Post by Mathaeus » 02 Dec 2015, 16:22

Daniel, so what you're using :), if not a secret...
By the way, just planning to add some Maya to home tools, so case is let's say ''* The character fits in a pipeline with other software'' - where I am that software, and my unit is of course 10cm. My Houdini Indie already had to learn how to live with this :) (Houdini is 1 meter) - Anyway I think I'll go with 1cm in Maya, once I'll start to build the first rig.
Thanks for answers.

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Daniel Brassard
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Re: Maya units

Post by Daniel Brassard » 02 Dec 2015, 19:05

@ Mathaeus,

No secret. I moved to the Ultimate suite in Oct 2014 (Maya/Max/Softimage/Mudbox). I have been using Maya mainly since, lot of programming as well (MEL, Python, C++). Rendering in Mental Ray and Renderman, may buy Redshift at one point but I need to pay for my camera lenses first (good quality glass is expensive).

I am still on the 2015 suite but I have the 2016 suite available (will probably do the move over the holidays).

Scale between apps is tricky, I always test the export between apps using a unit cube to compare.

What I found so far are that:

1 meter is 100 default Unit in Maya / Mudbox / Motion Builder
1 meter is 1 unit in Houdini / 3DMax / Unity / Rhinos and dynamic scale for Bifrost / ncloth / Syflex
1 meter is 10 unit in Softimage

That is if you are matching real world environment. Obviously, if you are modeling the extremely small (microbe) or extremely large (galaxy) you will hit precision issues and you will have to compensate for that in your "unit" world.
$ifndef "Softimage"
set "Softimage" "true"
$endif

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