How do you handle working units?

[pixho]

Hi,


Mmmh, for some reasons Maya doesn't handle properly units other than cm!
Specially for rendering, it's highly recommended to work in cm.

That's all I know :)

Good luck

Emmanuel

[alexx]

listen to pixho.. very wise words..
dont even think about touching the unit settings.. ;)

[stunndman]

ok - thanks a lot for that infofmation

so if i'm going to model something that's say one meter in width i'll make it 100 units wide (if working units is set to centimeter) !?

will there be any difference (in terms of rendering quality) if i make it 1 unit wide instead of 100 (assuming that working units is set to centimeters)

or let me ask it this way - is there any part in maya or external renderers that withdraw this information and make any conclusions out of it?

thx again

[alexx]

what you do before you start is defining how big one unit is.
lets put it the following way:

you model some small things so you define for yourself, that one unit is a centimeter.
if you model something like a car e.g. you can define that one unit is 10cm
and so on.

i would recommend to stay somewhere within a unit range of 0-1000 if possible.

larger units can result in problems with the z-buffer accuracy sometimes that are hard to fix. but that only happens very seldom if you take care about the camera clipping planes.

concerning rendering i only found that working with very large scales results in some funny behaviours in the particles shader (software render). some settings have to be done in 0.001 steps e.g.

but i did not have any other problems with larger scales.

hope that helps

cheers

alexx

[stunndman]

ok - thanks again - you cleared this up for me

[stanleyscupus]

we just switched from Meters to Centimeters but now our existing scenes are scaled pretty tiny in the scene.
Even worse, using the "frame all" shortkey on the keyboard "a" zooms the entire window waaaaaaaaaaaay out (probably to a size relative to what the scene was as meters). :eek:
Any clues how to correct this so that "frame all" works the proper way?
thanks :)

[stunndman]

wheee, flashback

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