Technical Difficulties with Maya...

[phubans]

I had these issues before with Maya 8.5 on my computer, but I just installed 2008 and it's no different... I think it's because I'm using my laptop's built-in, generic Intel video processor...

I have two issues; one is that about 40% of my view is completely gone when viewing it in a single pane. The other problem is that none of my transformation gizmos show up in any of the other viewports besides the one it was initiated in!

Has anybody else had any of these problems? Any advice on how to solve them?

[Hans Schrijvers]

Not sure, the first image seems like a clipping plane problem, which you should be able to fix in the camera attributes.

The second image, I am not sure, but perhaps those view ports have show manipulators unchecked?

[phubans]

Well that's the thing... I JUST installed it and all settings should be at default. It feels really broken... Other things aren't working, either... Such as the render settings. I guess I can work around it for opening my models at home and seeing how UV maps look on them and other small tasks, but it's pretty useless as a whole :(

[graduisc]

haha such a late reply. sorry. it probably has either deal with a graphics card problem specific to maya, or its a weird bug. I have the same problem on my laptop and it doesnt happen in any other 3d package.

hopefully this thread thats been active for about 4 years will have the solution for you. have fun..

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread. ... ge=1&pp=15 (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=7&t=128410&page=1&pp=15)

[rburke]

i get the same issue on my laptop actually so i cant model on it. It has an intel integrated graphics card which is really really shitty for just about everything. You'll notice if you resize the window to where it is clipping you will not experience that, its some odd issue where it can not draw full screen so i always had to work half-screen on my laptop, not easy on a 14 inch though. Most likely your card does not support maya properly sorry. Also that was on vista and the card supposesedly is dx10 compatible.

[graduisc]

haha i think i may have stumbled upon the solution to this problem. here

http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/showthread.php?t=23707

i have an integrated intel gfx too and whazzup says,

"Finally found out that it's an issue with the 32 bit colour setting in the display. Somehow x3100 has a problem with displaying in 32bit in maya. By setting it to 16 bit, everything will be viewable again.

In comparison, i have no such maya problems with notebooks with ati/nvidia cards in them, even for those low end ones. In conclusion, just be prepared that you MAY have to attempt the above workarounds if you want to run maya on machines with intel graphics.... "

im gonna try it and see if that works.

[rburke]

cool that did help, oddly enough i had tried changing the screen res many times with no result i never bothered trying to change the color depth, as i have not seen that be an issue since i was running on windows 2000 years ago. Funny thing is that integrated card cant display 90% of the 3d i throw at it but it will run the source engine without a hiccup. thanks again.


by the way any 1 who has the flickering/locking view port issue with maya try this. First of all often its the "use threaded optimization" option in the graphics drivers. It may be nvidia spicific. Setting that too off often solves the problem. But i can accross this maya env variable.
MAYA_GEFORCE_SKIP_OVERLAY=1
add to you maya.env in your documents/maya/(version#) folder. Pretty sure this is also nvidia specific but its an issue i had on xp ever since i got an 8 series card and this is the first fix i found that worked all the time. i can use maya properly again without having to hit space to redraw the screen every 2 minutes.

[jedhunsaker]

I had the exact same issue (half the viewport not showing) in February 2008 with my Sony VAIO laptop back then. I found the solution on CGTalk then as well, but the thread is so ginormous that I wouldn't want anyone to read through it.

Instead of a link to the entire thread, here's the specific post that solved the problem for me (link (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=4853439&postcount=306)).

Of course, you already know that because you have it working, but I've experienced other issues like the other one you mentioned as well (the manipulators not showing) and I wanted a reliable workstation at home, so I bought an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 and all my problems are solved! I'm super happy about the purchase! This won't help the laptop situation though.

Anyway, so if you want to be absolutely sure that you're getting all the features in Maya, you might want to purchase Autodesk Maya Qualified Hardware (link (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=9683256)).

They have some cheaper alternatives than what you might find in the computer labs at school and honestly? I think my home setup is better than the labs. I just wish I could bypass the lab fee at AAU. I have no idea what benefit I'm getting from Maya 2009 (64-bit), but everything seems to work really fast.

[rburke]

"no dont they are the exact same cards", what they do is say that these are supported cards "the quadro from nvidia or fire gl from ati. The cards are identical down to every transistor to their consumer level counterparts. Its total bs but thats how the industry works. So you want to build a workstation for your company so you go with an 8800gtx or something, it can play all games and is super fast has 768 megs of ram etc. Oh but you call nvidia support or maya support and they tell you that they cant help you because that card is not supported. Well what nvidia does is rebrand the same exact card as a quadro fx xxxx whatever version and sells it for like 2k bucks. But the only difference at all is the dirvers they use. And even then they are basically the same. They have been doing this for as long as i can remember. so what you can do is add a command to your maya env file to force maya to detect the consumer level card properly. I use this one MAYA_ENABLE_HWR_CG_PROGRAMS = 1

They do this because they know companies will pay for support "which is not really ever used"

But what happens is on the consumer level people start thinking they need to have some high dollar quadro card to use maya properly but that could not be further from the truth.

IF the card can run current gen games it can run maya, and honestly maya does not support hardly any hardware acceleration at all. You will notice no difference between a Professional series card and a Consumer one other than the support. SO please dont waste your money on shit you dont need, while schools and companines might be wasting their money there is no reason why students should be, dont fall prey to this trap.

sry to tell you but the lack of a manipulator could have been solved with a simple maya.env command listed above Maya_geforce_skip_overlay=1
and another one out there that fixes some other issues if they should arise.

[rburke]

oh and on the 64 bit maya you can load larger sets to memory so i can load a 4.5 mil poly model into maya for baking ao but in 32 bit i cant even load a mill poly model without it crashing out, plus it wont be able to render an ao pass on that due to memory constraints.

Also 64 bit os lets you access more ram which is nice for zbrush as you can subdivide your models much much higher without having to go into virtual memory every 2 minutes.

[jedhunsaker]

I feel used! For the money ($400), I could have gotten a way better graphics card than the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700. I heard Dabu say something about it in class (briefly), but I never really researched it until now.

So I did some research and it turns out you can soft-mod your NVIDIA GeForce to identify itself in Windows as the Quadro counterpart (link below, complete with performance results). This also allows you to install the optimized drivers intended for the Quadro cards.

NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Soft-Mod Guide (http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539&pgno=0)

You're right about Maya not supporting hardware acceleration though. Most of the tests ran faster after soft-modding, but Maya actually ran up to 5% SLOWER!

My only concern is this claim on Wikipedia that soft-modding "will not offer anywhere near the performance of the equivalent Quadro card [citation needed]."

Wikipedia: NVIDIA Quadro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Quadro)

I'm guessing some NVIDIA shareholder slipped that in there? I'd really like to debunk this claim. Anyone?

I would really like to know if anyone has successfully soft-modded their GeForce card as a Quadro in Windows Vista especially.

[rburke]

you can do it in vista using riva tuner genrally but i dont recomend soft mods for the gpu, this can cause issues since it flashes the bios with that of the quadro, that said you can always fallback to the old bios if you backup. There are other workarounds but any 8 series card and above should support pretty much any maya feature around. and yeah that thing on wikipedia is total bs the card is the same what you look into is the chipset thats in it. The core gpu is identical most of the time. There used to be an issue with this as well on a different level. They would create one card, and then disable parts of it and sell them as lower levels of the card, so if you wanted the full performance of the card you would need to buy the highest model the one that is 200% more. They stopped doing this about 2 years ago with the release of the 8 series. Probably after lots of people found out how to soft mod their cards to recognize all of their cards features. This is probablyt he most common dupe in the industry, they even do it on cpu's i ussually buy base model cpus like my i7 920 2.66 ghz then i just overclock it to the identical but twice as expensive i7 940 3.0 ghz at the core both are identical, but one costs more basically.

you may also notice nvidia did this with its TESLA processing unit. It was just an 8800 gtx that could be used for other types of computation, but not branded as a gpu. Thing is the gpu can do this too, after 8 series and up the gpu is programmable and unified, so it can be made to process many types of data not just graphics stuff. Nvidia even released a patch so you can use your gpu to process physx (formerly ageia)

eventually people will get wise to these scams and stop buying the stuff but dont expect it any time soon, as long as its profitable for them to rebrand products for different markets they will continue to do so. But as long as you dont need nvidias support or autodesks then no issue ive never had to contact either company so im not paying for that lol.