WinXP Fix: Maya and Weird Graphics Glitches

[wgreenlee1]

I never run any visual themes what so ever....pretty much a waste of your processing power.
If all I ever did was surf the net then I might but I figured out after a while that the visual stuff is bull~hockey anyway.

[lricho]

You should find that running in classic mode also helps performance slightly and fixes a few other little bugs. Doesnt help with the playblast problem in XP though :( For that, you just have to make sure that no new window (including mouseover tooltips) appears whilst playblasting. Plant your mouse pointer somewhere safe and make sure that MSN messenger is turned off! :)

[MaDSheeP]

hmm... i haven't experimented with playblast yet, but i will keep that in mind =)

[lricho]

yeah, if your playblast seems to freeze while in the middle of generating it, you probably had your mouse resting over something for too long and a tooltip popped up, or something like that. damn annoying. took me ages to figure that one out. On the A/W website, they just say that this problem doesnt have a workaround.

[playmesumch00ns]

hehehe I haven't had a problem playblasting, but I did have trouble when I was hardware rendering a block test for a client and was just about to upload it when I thought I'd better check through. Glad I did as the hardware render buffer had just picked up loads of screen caps of me checking my e-mails!

[GrafOrlok]

No problem playblasting?? I've had my playblasts freezing in 90% of the times. It's been like that since I started with 4.5 in XP. 4.02 worked fine. It's most anoying when working on a heavy animation scene. It seems related to having windows open, such as the hyper graph or blend shape window and similar. I've also noticed that the first time you do a playblast in a Maya pass, it works, but not the second time. You must restart Maya to do another Playblast...:thumbsdow

[GrafOrlok]

BTW I tried switching off all good stuff for Maya as suggested and still... The hypershade lost all text and things seem to act just as funny as it used to... Tried changing compatibility mode to win2k but still no difference. Oh well, I'll just have to face it. Maya acts funny. Period.:annoyed:

[BadMange]

...it's more like XP causes Maya to act funnier than usual! I use the XP Silver theme, and disable all the "fancy" crap. I really only use XP for fast user-switching, for when the wife wants to check her email, do a little surfing, etc. Man I wish 2000 had that feature... (you hear that, Herr Gates?)

Excuse my ignorance, but what is "playblasting"? And can't you disable tooltips in XP?

-Bad Mange

P.S. Thanks for the tip, I'll have to try that.

[GrafOrlok]

"playblasting" is when you test an animation by rendering using the graphics card to output a series of images to be viewed in realtime. Ususally when you have a large complex scene or high density models it will not run in real time just by hitting "play" in Maya.

[lricho]

Its not just tooltips in maya - The main problem I had was that I would move my mouse to the taskbar area and if there happened to be an item in there, the tooltip would appear for that window. (you know - leave your mouse over the start menu button and a yellow "click here to begin" tooltip appears). That sort of thing was getting me every time. Now I am just careful where i put the mouse.
edit: whoops, just read your post properly. :D I didnt know you can turn tooltips off in xp. Where abouts exactly?

[BadMange]

To disable ToolTips in Windows XP:

1) Open the Registry Editor
2) Navigate to HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop.
3) Double-click UserPreferencemask and change its value to 3E 00 00 00.
4) Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows.

I got this from
XP Corner.com (http://www.xpcorner.com/tipsandtricks/tt50.shtml).

What about changing Maya's compatability mode to 2000 (right-click Maya icon > Properties > Compatability) . Would this work?

-Bad Mange

[wazzup]

I would like to know what that does. I`ll give it a try...

[GrafOrlok]

Another thing that I've noticed with Maya5 is that since I use a dual monitor setup, I've always had some glitches along the way, but now they are suddenly quite a few. It kind of lags if I zoom in and out in the hypergraph or hypershade window. Also, and what makes it virtually impossible to work is that when I RMB in the hypergraph or hypershade window when it is placed in the second monitor I can't get the RMB-list to appear. I have to move the window to the main monitor and then RMB over the node...:banghead:

Might have something to do with Maya5 and OpenGL. I run on a GeForce4 Ti4800. Disabling the vidual themes or changing compatibility mode does not make any difference.

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