Hello,
I discovered some 30 serious bugs recently while working with Maya.
Here is the list with some scene files and visuals illustrating the issues:
2-Mia_material“use color at max distance” issue (medium severity):
I have the mia_material applied to a sphere with only refraction turned ON. When I check “use max distance” and set it to 5, the color of the refraction fades to black after 5 units and everything works fine. Now when I also check “use color at max distance” and set it to red, the refraction color switches to red as expected, but the refraction doesn’t fade after 5 units anymore. Why is the fade effect note taking place anymore when “use color at max distance” is turned ON? Is that a bug in the mia_material?
http://sor.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8350600cb53ef01a73dd54e14970d-800wi
http://www.filefactory.com/file/p5lrh2km0tn/2\_mia\_material\_max\_color\_issue.7z
3-Duplicating mia_material shader network issue (high severity):
When duplicating the same mia_material shader network over and over again and applying the different shaders to several objects, some materials start to behave weirdly in the render specially when using Final Gather (Splotches and other weird artifacts on the surface they are applied on). Is that a bug in MentalRay for Maya? Is duplicating the shader networks a bad habit in MentalRay for Maya, should re-create a material from scratch each time?
4-Composition issue (high severity):
I simply want my composited render to look exactly like my beauty render but when overlaying the 2 final pictures on top of each other in After Effects, there is always a slight difference. As for my composited layers, it’s super simple consisting of one scene render of my foreground 3D objects with mia_sky “use background” checked ON and no texture plugged so the backgrounds is pure black and another render of my mia_sky background with all the rest hidden. I have “pre-multiply” checked on in the render globals and when importing to After Effects I check “premultiplied with black” in the import footage settings. I don’t understand why I don’t get the exact same result as my beauty render. What am I doing wrong?
http://sor.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8350600cb53ef01a511ca0b9f970c-800wi
http://www.filefactory.com/file/338olg75her1/4\_composotion\_issue.7z
7-Gamma correction issue (high severity):
Why is there still a difference between images rendered with materials texture corrected with the gamma correct node, and images rendered with “enable color management” mode turned ON (without the gamma correct nodes this time)? There is still a slight difference between the 2 renders, where does it come from? Isn’t the exact calculation/sampling happening in both methods?
http://sor.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8350600cb53ef01a511ca0bcc970c-800wi
http://sor.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8350600cb53ef01a73dd54e85970d-800wi
http://www.filefactory.com/file/3dcwiykfu08l/7\_gamma\_correction\_issue.7z
8-Swatches issue (high severity):
Why in Maya 2014, slot colors are still not gamma corrected automatically when “enable color management” is checked on?
9-Mirror issue (low severity):
In real life if you have a pitch dark room where you have a ball and in front of it a flashlight oriented towards a mirror, the ball will be lit by the light of the flashlight reflected by the mirror. In Maya this doesn’t work when the scene is replicated, shouldn’t the ball be lit by the reflected light regardless of global illumination?
http://sor.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8350600cb53ef01a3fd1a8fdf970b-800wi
http://www.filefactory.com/file/66wh1d2se6m9/9\_mirror\_issue.7z
10-Final gather fall off issue (medium severity):
I have a simple scene with final gather turned ON, and the color of my environment is red. I also have a polygon with a ramp texture plugged to the color of its surface shader and few spheres and both the polygon and the little spheres are enveloped by a huge sphere (image A).
When I render with the default final gather FallOff values (so zero and zero) all is normal (image B). In the docs it says the “Falloff Start” is the distance after which the final gather contribution of objects switches to the environment color but when I render with “Falloff Start” set to 10, after 10 units from each point, the color switches to gray and not to red which is the color of my environment (image C)? Is that a bug? What is happening here?
On the other hand its says in the docs that the “Falloff Stop” is the distance after which objects will not be considered for final gathering but when I set “Falloff Stop” value to 10 (image D), after 10 units from each point, the color switches to a reddish value, shouldn’t it switch to black since no final gathering is taking effect? And what’s this bizarre reddish color, it’s not even the color of my environment.
http://sor.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8350600cb53ef01a3fd1a9001970b-800wi
http://www.filefactory.com/file/38i4n3n1mt25/10\_final\_gather\_falloff\_issue.7z
11-Unified sampling mode not good enough (high severity):
I got a feeling that no matter what I try the “Legacy sampling” mode is always giving better and cleaner results then the “Unified Sampling” mode. For instance here is a typical case where I am trying to render faraway and tiny elements like antennas on building or cistern structures (download also the PSD for a better look). Notice how in “Legacy” mode, the image is clean and sharp and how in “Unified sampling” mode it looks blurry and jagged (specially the bars of the antenna and of the cistern) even if I boost the settings to very high values. Can’t I obtain with “Unified sampling” mode the same (not asking for better) results as in “legacy sampling” mode? Am I missing something here? Or is the “Unified sampling” mode just limited and incapable of giving similar or better results than the “legacy sampling” mode?
http://sor.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8350600cb53ef01a3fd1a9012970b-800wi
http://www.filefactory.com/file/6d78ljbke88l/11\_unified\_sampling\_issue.7z
12-Mia_photometric_light buggy behavior issue (high severity):
When I create a spot light and attach the “mia_photometric_light” as its light shader and the distribution mode to 1 (so spotlight), it works fine. But if I duplicate the spotlight with “duplicate input connections” switched ON, the created lights render with the same “mia_photometric_light” shader but if I change the spot angle of the duplicated lights (in the spotlight Maya options), nothing happens, why is that? And why can I only change the original spotlight’s angle? Why can’t I change the spot angle of the other lights? Note that this doesn’t happen with normal duplicated spotlights (so no “mia_photometric_light attached to the lights) even if I check “duplicate input connections” ON, every duplicated spotlight behaves normally and I can change each spotlight angle individually.
13-Mia_photometric_light spotlight mode not working in Maya 2014(high severity):
If I plug the “mia_photometric_light” to my spotlight and set the “distribution mode” to 1, nothing happens while the other modes work normally.(so 0 which is isotropic and 2 which is the IES profile.) Is that a known bug?
14-Spot light scale affecting intensity with “mia_photometric_light(high severity):
If I scale my spotlight gizmo to different scales and render nothing happens which is normal and expected. But If I attach a “mia_photometric_light shader to my spotlight and then scale it up or down in the viewport, then the intensity of the spotlight will change accordingly. Why is that happening? Shouldn’t the render be the same regardless of the scale?
15-“Mental Ray Batch Bake Options” window and “Convert” button bugs (medium severity):
Sometimes when I am baking Mental Ray lightmaps, if I Open the “Mental Ray Batch Bake Options” window and hit “Convert”, nothing happens, I have to click outside the window and re-click on “Convert” or hit “Convert” 5 or 6 times in order to launch the bake. This happens specially after a few bakes and this bug is very annoying, frustrating and above all confusing. And even worse, sometimes if I close the window and reopen it again after a few bakes, a short version of the windows opens up (so no the complete window), to resolve this, I have to close it again and reopen it from the “lighting/shading” menu, this is also very confusing.
16-“mib_lookup_spherical” and light baking issue (medium severity):
When I am baking light maps, if I plug a “mib_lookup_spherical” to the Mental Ray “environment shader” of my camera, Mental Ray doesn’t take it’s illumination into account when baking. Why is that? Is that a big? Or is this a limitation set on purpose? This is really weird, because If I plug this “mib_lookup_spherical” to the “custom environment” slot of my “mia_portal_light” then Mental Ray takes it into account when baking, so why doesn’t it recognize the “mib_lookup_spherical” in the bake when its plugged to a camera as an “environment shader”?
17-Grid bug issue (low severity):
When I uncheck “Grid” in the display menu options and close Maya, and then reopen Maya, the grid is still there, sometimes it’s not but a lot of time it’s still there, that’s for the perspective view. In the orthographic view every time I uncheck “Grid” and reopen, the grid reappears, that’s guaranteed and that happens even If I click “Save Preferences” in the “File” menu before saving the file and closing Maya. And what is weird is that when I reopen Maya, and I see the unwanted grid and then go to “Display” menu the “Grid” looks unchecked even if I see it in the viewport (specially for orthographic views), so I have to check it ON again and nothing happens because it is already displayed in the viewport and then recheck it OFF so it can disappear.. Why is that happening? This bug has been hanging around in Maya for years now.
18-“Poly Count” heads up display bug(low severity):
If I click “isolate select” in the “show” menu, then combine several polygon meshes and then separate them, the triangle count in the viewport gets doubled, I have to exit “isolate select” mode and re-enter it so that the triangle count shows the right amount of triangles on the isolated objects and in the scene. This is a very misleading and frustrating mode while modeling.
19-Poly edge highlight issue (low severity):
Often during modeling I enter “Edge mode” select edges, perform a few operations and then exit this mode but I still have a few edges selected (so highlighted in pale orange). To get rid of this weird and unwanted highlighted edges, I have to re-enter “Edge” mode and select those highlighted edges and then deselect them again and exit “Edge” mode (so back to “Object” mode). This is a very annoying bug that has been around for years.
20-“Interactive split tool” and highlighted edges bug (low severity):
Sometimes if perform an “Interactive split tool” operation on my poly mesh then deselect and select my object again and enter edge mode, some edges gets highlighted automatically (usually edge rings)and they are not even the ones that were created during the “Interactive split tool” operation (note that this also happens with the “insert edge loop” tool). Why does this happen very often? This bug is very annoying and time consuming.
21-Opening files issue (low severity):
When I open Maya and then click on “Open Scene” in the “file” menu and then choose and open a file, everything works just fine. But If am in the desktop or in a folder and double click on a Maya file, Maya is launched but when the file is loaded I get a UI with no viewport, so I get all the UI elements but no perspective window just a solid dark gray instead. Why does this happen? Is that a bug?
22-Viewport transparency Issue (medium severity):
Whenever I have a transparent texture on my objects in the viewport, things start to get a little bit weird when some transparent objects which are far away from the camera start to look as if they are just in front of it, occluding other transparent objects, in other words some poly faces gets drawn before other ones when they are not supposed to. I always use NVidia GTX video cards and always have the latest drivers. This is a very annoying issue that has been in Maya for years. How can I fix this problem?
23-Material swatches issue (medium severity):
Each time I plug a texture to my material in the hypershade, the sample swatch of the material just doesn’t gets updated. Instead updating automatically, each time I have to double click on the swatch in the attribute editor of the material so it can updates (yes, I have the “render swatches (startup)” checked ON in the “Preferences/Display” menu. This is very annoying and time consuming especially when you have more than 3 materials.
24-Batch select elements and tweak options issue (medium severity):
There is a very frustrating limitation inside of Maya that have been around for years and it’s the fact that you just can’t select several elements of the same nature, say 1 few spotlights and set the angle or intensity on one of them so that it applies to all selected spotlights.
Now of course there is the “Attribute Spreadsheet Editor” for that, but this is not even an option in many situations, for instance there is no advanced Mental Ray options exposed (example: low and high area light samples), so life can quickly turn into a nightmare when you have 20 lights or more (not to mention other situations). Every other software in the industry has been incorporating the “select all and set the value once” method (the one I mentioned before) because it’s the most intuitive for this namely Unity 3D. I really don’t understand the stubbornness here, Why can’t Autodesk just incorporate this intuitive, productive, efficient and life changing feature in Maya?
25-Texture update issue(medium severity):
“File” and “PSD File” nodes never gets updated in the viewport and UV editor when they are changed and saved in Photoshop, instead I have to click on reload each time I tweak something in the texture in Photoshop. Why can’t it update automatically like in Max or Unity? Not having this in Maya for years has been very annoying, confusing, frustrating, inefficient and time consuming.
26-Display 2Bit alpha transparency in the viewport (low severity):
The alpha of 8bit RGBA image has 8 bits (so 256 levels of transparency). Can we display the alpha of the transparency in a 2 bits format just like in max? This is very useful to test the transparency inside Maya before exporting assets to the game engine.
27-Maya crashes after several “Combine” and “Separate” operations (high severity):
Sometimes when I combine then separate several objects a few times, Maya crashes even if I delete history periodically. This becomes very annoying when one uses those two operations a lot.
28-Disappearing object issue after “Combine” and “Separate” operations (high severity):
Sometimes when I perform several “Combine” and “Separate” operations (specially “Combine”) the mesh just disappears from the viewport, to bring it back I have to select its name in the outliner, delete it and then perform and “Undo” so it reappears. This is a very confusing and annoying bug.
29-Disappearing object issue after exiting Maya (high severity):
Sometimes when I perform several “Combine” and “Separate” operations on some objects then delete history, save, close and then reopen Maya the mesh (that I performed the operations on) simply disappear, I can see its name in the outliner but nothing is in the viewer, it simply lost forever. This is unacceptable in a software like Maya, and sometimes can cause serious problem with clients or in Work.
30-Maya asking if you want to save an unchanged scene (low severity):
If I open a scene and close it or open another even without doing anything to it, Maya brings up a dialog box asking if I want to save the changes to the scene, this becomes quickly very annoying when working with multiple scenes, Why does Maya ask this question each time even If I haven’t perform anything to the scene?
31-“Undo” turned OFF suddenly (high severity):
Sometimes when I am performing a lot of successive operation while modeling, the “Undo” simply gets turned OFF in the references for no reason and sometimes this could be very destructive when there is no way back. Is that a bug in Maya? Is there any way of avoiding this?
32-“Redo” working only a few times (high severity):
I can perform as many “Undo” as I want (as long as “infinite” is checked in the “preferences”) but sometimes when I go back let’s say 20 steps, and decide to “Redo” those 20 “steps” I can only perform like 4 or 5 “Undo” and this could be really destructive. Why does this happen? Why am I sometimes limited to a certain amount of “Redo” even If I have “infinite” checked in the “preferences”?
33-“Bridge” tool messes up the UVs(medium severity):
When I perform more than one “Bridge” operation in the same mesh, the UVs start to get messed up even those who are not affected by the operation. Why is that? How can I fix this (I use the ”bridge” tool a lot)?
34-“Bridge” tool UV shell issue (high severity):
And sometimes the face generated during the “bridge” operation doesn’t seem to get a UV shell no matter what I try, as if it’s forbidden to have a UV shell, even if I unwrap it specifically. Why does this happen? Is this a bug? How can avoid this issue?