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Wednesday, July 8, 2009

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.

posted by admin at 10:43 AM  

5 Comments »

  1. Hi Chris,
    I’m following your blog via your RSS feed with google reader, and this post appears with the following garbage content, while other posts do only show their titles… This may not be relevent but i thought i should let you know.
    Cheers,
    Nicolas.

    garbage content follows:

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    Comment by rotoglup — 2009/07/08 @ 8:56 PM

  2. Ok, I am trying to fix, the wordpress security plugin says it is all fixed…. frustrating! 😀

    Comment by admin — 2009/07/09 @ 12:48 AM

  3. I see this frequently even in Maya 8.0 on 32-bit Windows XP (we’re in the process of transitioning some teams to 2009 now) – I’ll see if it fixes the issue in 8.0 at work tomorrow, and will make sure this setting is standard for our 2009 installs.

    Thanks for the heads up!

    Comment by Richard — 2009/07/09 @ 7:15 AM

  4. Hi, yes we too had the same run around form autodesk’s “premium” support.
    Constantly getting the supported hardware message.

    There is also another fix for Maya 2008 and 2009 (prior to 2009SP1a) in case of freezing in the viewport when scrubbing the timeline or rotating the camera)

    MAYA_NO_PARALLEL_DRAW=1

    (If you are running maya 2009Sp1a you dont need this)
    Dave

    Comment by floppyDJ — 2009/07/21 @ 2:55 PM

  5. whoa thanks a million! i’ve been dealing with this issue with Maya 64 (any version) on XP 64 for a while now and this is the only fix that seems to work. too bad I’m mostly working in Max now (on a CryEngine based project btw)

    Comment by Howard — 2009/08/21 @ 12:11 AM

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