Maya FAQ

General Tips

1. Infinite Undo.

   The default undo level is fairly low. For working in Maya, it can be helpful to have more levels of undo than the default. To set the level to infinite, choose Window->Settings/Preferences->Preferences, choose Undo (third from the bottom), set Undo to be on, and Queue to be infinite.

2. Maya Projects

   Projects are good to keep your files and Maya settings collected together. Before you start a project, choose File->Projects->New. To switch between projects, choose File->Projects->Set.

MEL

1. I run a MEL script, which does many things, and Maya runs the computer out of memory. What's going on?

   If undo is turned onto infinite, Maya is caching undo information for every action your script does. You probably want to turn undo off, and possibly construction history as well.

Modeling

1. I've imported a model into Maya, but the lighting looks all wrong. Can this be fixed?

   Maya, under some circumstances, when loading models from a source other than maya, does something strange with the model's normals. This can cause lighting to look wrong. "Unlocking" the normals can often fix the problem.

   Select, from the Modeling menu set: Edit Polygons->Normals->Set Vertex Normal [option]. Choose the Unlock Normals check box in the upper right. Apply.

Animation

Rendering

1. How do I add zero padding to my frame numbers so that they're in order in the directory?

   Go to Window->Rendering Editors->Render Globals. Choose the Frame/Animation Ext to be name.#.ext. Go down to the Frame Padding field and choose some reasonable number, like 4. A frame padding of 4 will get you 10,000 frames in the proper order.

2. How do I sequence rendered frames into an animation?

   Use Virtual Dub. Virtual Dub supports frames in TGA or BMP format, so make sure you render to one of these formats.

   1. Start Virtual Dub from p:\graphics\Tools\VirtualDub\VirtualDub.exe
   2. Make sure Full Processing Mode is set under the Video menu.
   3. Make sure that No Audio is set under the Audio menu.
   4. Under Video, choose compression. Set compression to be DivX (the default settings should be OK).
   5. You can now choose Open video file from the File menu. Navigate to the the first frame of your video sequence. The frames must be in tga format.
   6. Save as AVI from the File menu.
   
   
3. Um, I rendered my frames to JPG, or some format other than TGA, but I don't want to re-render. How do I convert my frames?

   You should be able to use the ImageMagic UNIX command line tool convert to change image formats. If you are using tcsh as your shell, and you rendered to JPG, the following should do the trick:

   cd FRAME_DIRECTORY
   foreach frame (*.jpg)
   convert $frame `basename $frame .jpg`.tga
   end
   	  

   Or in bash:

   cd FRAME_DIRECTORY
   for frame in *.jpg;
   convert $frame `basename $frame .jpg`.tga;
   done 
   	  

   If you don't want your frames intermixed in the same directory, you could also:

   cd FRAME_DIRECTORY
   mkdir tga
   foreach frame (*.jpg)
   convert $frame tga/`basename $frame .jpg`.tga
   end