Buggy Camera Issues In Maya on x64
Many, many people are having weird, buggy camera issues where you rotate a view and it snaps back to the pre-tumbled state (view does not update properly). There are posts all over, and Autodesk’s official response is “Consumer gaming videocards are not supported”. Really? That’s basically saying: All consumer video cards, gaming or not, are unsupported. I have had this issue on my laptop, which is surely not a ‘gaming’ machine. Autodesk says the ‘fix’ is to upgrade to an expensive pro-level video card. But what they maybe would tell you if they weren’t partnered with nVidia is: It’s an easy fix!
Find your Maya ENV file:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\maya\2009-x64\Maya.env
And add this environment variable to it:
MAYA_GEFORCE_SKIP_OVERLAY=1
Autodesk buried this information in their Maya 2009 Late Breaking Release Notes, and it fixes the issue completely! However, even on their official forum, Autodesk employees and moderators reply to these draw errors as follows:
Maya 2009 was tested with a finite number of graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia, with drivers from each vendor that provided the best performance, with the least amount of issues. (at the time of product launch). A list of officially qualified hardware can be found here: http://www.autodesk.com/maya-hardware. Maya is not qualified/supported on consumer gaming cards. Geforce card users can expect to have issues. This is clearly stated in the official qualification charts mentioned above.