Maya 2015 Tool Menus and Drop-Downs Not Appearing in Specific Scene

[acornbringer]

Hello!

One particular scene I'm working in has this weird issue with the right-click menus and other tool drop-down menus where they seem to randomly not open up at all. For example, some times the File, Edit, Modify, etc toolbar options won't drop down. At the same time the view port toolbar options will refuse to do the same. I also noticed the right-click menu for the timeline not appearing until I adjust the Range Slider. One time when the view port tools weren't showing, I changed from a one panel perspective view to the 4 panel view and tried again; when I clicked on a tool, the menu showed up but was off on some other part of the screen at a funny resolution (Below).

Does anyone know what is going on with this one particular file? All my other scenes don't have this issue so maybe there is a way to refresh the tool menu preferences that I'm not aware of.

Thanks!

Maya 2015 SP6

Windows 10 1803

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060

[sean.heasley]

Hi @acornbringer

This may be an issue with your GPU.

The 1060 is on our certified hardware list and our supported driver for it is version 390.77.

When you get a chance, can you please check to see if that is the driver you are currently working with?

If it is not your current driver, please uninstall your GPU driver and install version 390.77 which can be found here!

Please let me know if this helps or if you need any more assistance!

If one or more of these posts helped answer your question, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

Kudos are greatly appreciated. Everyone likes a thumbs up!

[acornbringer]

Hey Sean, thanks for the reply!

I am using earlier drivers than the ones you suggested. I have Nvidia Graphics Driver 382.05 installed now.

Because I have a laptop, I got a specific driver from the manufacturer for the unique GPU and setup they created. From past experience, I have found that using different drivers for laptops can causes other issues. So for now I'd like to rule out any other potential causes before updating my drivers.

Knowing this issue is only occurring on a specific file, I feel like that localizes the problem to the scene itself. Do you think there are any settings in the file itself like the data that saves the layout on a scene by scene basis that I could try to refresh somehow?

Thanks again!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @acornbringer

Ah ok, since the problem is scene specific, a quick test you could try would be to export everything to an FBX and import it into a new scene file to see if anything changes.

If that doesn't work, when you get a chance can you please zip and attach the scene file here or via dropbox/google drive or another file sharing program so I can take a look at it?

I'd like to see if the same issue occurs on my machine. If the file is confidential or under NDA please send it to me in a private message!

[mspeer]

Hi!

Try import instead of open, but for further troubleshooting a scene-file is needed as @sean.heasley suggested.

[acornbringer]

Hi again!

I tried both importing an .fbx version of the scene into a fresh scene as well as importing the .mb file into a new scene and both of them were free of this issue. Each time I did this I closed and re-opened Maya to make sure nothing was being carried over. Before, I noticed that once I opened the problematic scene file, any other scene I opened after it - weather it be a new scene or a scene I had saved - would inherit the tool drop-down issues until I restarted Maya fully.

What I could do from here is import the .mb into a new scene and continue to work from that file instead. Should I worry about any important data that gets lost when importing full scenes this way?

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@sean.heasley wrote:

I'd like to see if the same issue occurs on my machine. If the file is confidential or under NDA please send it to me in a private message!

You should receive a private message with a link to the problematic file. Let me know if you see anything funny in there or if it looks fine.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @acornbringer

Thanks for attaching the file!

I opened it normally and had no issues with the menus or drop downs.

I also opened the file in notepad and glanced through to see if any red flags stuck out and didn't notice anything.

From here, I think importing into a new scene file and working from there may be your best bet. That said, I'd recommend keeping backups of this file and any more as you continue to work just in case something unusual happens with the "new" file.

Please let me know if this information helps or if you need any more assistance!

[acornbringer · Accepted solution]

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@sean.heasley wrote:

I opened it normally and had no issues with the menus or drop downs.

I also opened the file in notepad and glanced through to see if any red flags stuck out and didn't notice anything.

Thanks for looking into all that stuff for me!

I think I just stumbled upon the source of this problem randomly. It has to do with my laptop monitor and the second screen I have attached. What I noticed was if I save a file with a window such as the Graph Editor on a screen other than the one Maya is on then save, that file will open up with the tool menu drop-down problems. If I then go and move the window back onto the same screen that has Maya - or even move Maya over to the screen where the window is - and save, that file will open up with no issues so long as I had restarted Maya first.

This seems like a pretty unique problem and most likely has to do with the display drivers and how I'm handling the two different sized screens through Windows. I don't think Maya 15 expects this kind of setup where as a later version might handle things better.

Thanks to all of you for helping me troubleshoot this issue!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @acornbringer

Ah that would make sense, there have been some issues with Maya on multiple monitors but I hadn't seen this one before.

Thanks for explaining and hopefully this will help anyone else that may stumble upon this thread !