Maya's default units?

[uhavali]

Hi,
I wanted to confirm the unit of measurement that Maya uses for its internal coordinate system is centimeters. Can someone please confirm this? Also, please give me a link to any documentation you know about this.
Thanks!

[joojaa]

Yes, but theres not mch things that are realy affected by this! Everything is relative with exception of dynamics wich themselves can be fixed with an easy correction factor.

[uhavali]

That's good. Thanks! But dynamics and maya cloth is my concern. I wanted to know is how dynamics reacts to the working units...for example what will the default gravity of 0,-980,0 mean? 9.8m/sec sq in the negative direction?

Also, when using the solver scale in maya cloth, if the solver scale is 2.0, then does the solver coordinate system use Maya's current working units and double that value? for example, if Maya's current setting is feet, and my model is 1 foot tall, and solver scale is 2, will the solver simulate for a model eqivalent to 2 feet?

Sorry if i am making something very simple very complicated!

[joojaa]

Humm i think maya cloth uses a different way to measure things than rest of maya. Atleast the gravity is different from the rest so id asume other things are too.

Dynamics in generel mesure in newtons (kgm/s^2)

But i think a value -980 in cloth sim would equal to 9.80 newtons in other dynamics. Im not sure but i think cloth asumes meters instead of centimeters.

[mole]

Sorry slightly different topic.

I made a scene 1/10 of the real size.
What the camera (and other) settings would be?

The default Camera Scale is 1 and Focal Length is 35.
Therefore I changed the Camera scale to 0.1 and the Focal Length to 3.5.
I should(or shouldn't?) set working unit to meter.
And cloth solver scale should be 10.

Is that all?

But it's so hard doing anything because of the zoom speed.

In Light Wave, I always modeled in real size.
How do you usually model in Maya?
Is there any probrem modeling in real size?
In my opinion, the clip plane setting is not a probrem as long as I keep it relatively small value.

Sorry for my English.
What I really want to know is, do you model in real size?

Thank you in advance.

[macaronikazoo]

in my experience, changing the default unit in maya is a BAD idea... we unfortunately made the decision early on in the piece to use metres as default. just about everything still works, but you get some weird shite happening.

like the closestPointOnCurve plugin doesn't really work with metres, the distance tool displays metres, but the attribute is actually in cm, you get weird stuff happening with the motionPath node... the list goes on.

you can work around all these problems, its just that they're there, and not nessecarily obvious.

[joojaa]

Yes well... If you think of them as units then you could tell yourself that the units are actualy meter instead of centimeter and then scale dynamics down appropriately.
Now the units a are in fact meter, even if maya thinks of them as senttimeters. And as long as everyone in the firm knows this its fine! Altough now if you want to use feet and inches scaling dynamics gets a bit tedious, but in metrics adding or taking one meor digit isnt hard!

Ideal cameras are size less so a 35mm lense works as a 35mm lense in cm sclae as well as m scale. And if zooming is slow open up the dolly tool settings and adjust (you can find it in the menus atached to the viewports!). Remember a virtual pinhole camera has no size!

[mole]

Thank you macaroniKazoo and Joojaa.
That was very helpful.
I figure we make models 1/10 of its size.
That's because we don't want to type like 5000 centimeters.