Units in Maya

[jyanavajra789]

Is there a speical unit in maya( like one unit = to 1 inch?)
or can i change the settings?

[empleh]

By default maya uses centimeter as the working unit. It doesn't really matter though, as long as your proportions are correct . Meaning a 1 inch cube and a 4 inch cube have the same relationship to one another that a 1 cm and 4 cm cube have. I normally don't change the working units in maya because different people working on a group project might get out of scale of one another.

Anyway, if you do want to change the default scale you can do so under Window->Settings Preferences->Preferences. Look in the settings under categories.

I've always wondered if the working units had an affect on depth fo field settings for the camera. If anyone reading this knows please chime in.

Thanks and good luck,
ww

[uhavali]

On the same note, i wonder if changing the working units changes the forces like wind, gravity etc. Or will the default for gravity of 0,-980,0 always mean a negative 980 mm/sec sq. (9.8m/sec sq.)?

Can anyone shed some light on this please?

[joojaa]

Empleh funn you shoudl say that i said allmost exactly the same thing in maya general ust a sec ago!

[yellowsayshello]

I can't say for sure, but I have had issues where changing the units seemed to screw things up and changing it back fixed them. I've seen advice in a few places to leave them as centimetres for that very reason - dynamics and other things (e.g. wrap deformer) do not work pedictably when you change the units. Nothing for sure, but I've avoided it since and never had the problems again. That was a long time ago though.

[joojaa]

never change them theres no need to... Just convert your values with appropriate conversion values.

[ralp99]

I'm with the metric crowd here, besides the likelihood of features that might be hard-coded to work in metric, there's just something maddening about trying to find the median of 7' 7/32".

Besides, I'm an old LW veteran, and learned to think 'metrically' there.

wes parham

[ch83575]

I am trying to use Maya 4.5 for arch-vis. , and when I import files from aCAD or anything else for that matter the units are so drasticly off that it is hard to work! I could parent all imported geomitry to a single transform node then scale it to .0001 to make it workable in cm, but that seems silly.

But on the other hand everybody says that you can run into problems if you dont use cm (I think i am running into a few scale relatated problems myself on my current project actualy).

Are there any sugestions as to how to import such large files scale wise?

[joojaa]

Import group and scale down! But yiu can work in big scale too no sweat. Just change your near far clipping planes accordingly for cameras and change the dolly tools speed!