Maya manipulator tools stopped functioning properly on Surface Pro 4

[Anonymous]

I have had Maya 2013 installed on my Surface Pro 4 for a few years now. Everything worked well and as expected. At some point, years later, I seem to have trouble primarily with the scale and rotation manipulators.

It has stopped allowing me to scale or rotate an object across a single specific axis. It only appears to scale or rotate across all 3 axis at once. Somehow I found that if i disable the Intel Iris Graphics 540 display adapter through the device manager, it works again. However, this seems rather inconvenient, wrong and ridiculous if it was working before without having to take this step. Not to mention, disabling this display adapter prevents other graphics applications to not work, like games and more.

Has anyone else encountered this issue and is there a fix?
I would really like to get this working properly again.

[brentmc]

Hi,

That sounds like a graphic driver issue. There are a a couple of ways to deal with this.

1) Open Windows > Settings / Preferences > Preferences > Display and change the Viewport 2.0 Rendering Engine (at the bottom) to DirectX 11. (which is more forgiving with integrated graphics cards in my experience) 

2) Try to find a certified driver for your graphics card or a driver update that resolves the issue.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/simplecontent/content/maya-certified-...

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Brent

[Anonymous]

Hi Brent,

Thanks for the reply. I gave your solution a try and encountered another snag. I don't appear to have this option and the plugin is not listed in the plugin manager. Is there somewhere I can download this from or is it in a directory folder I can import into Maya?

[brentmc]

Ooops, I just realized you said Maya 2013 which is why you don't have the display options I mentioned.

I still think it is hardware related (so you could try different graphics card drivers) but your options are limited given how old your copy of Maya is.

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Brent

[Anonymous]

I'm having a hard time finding updated drivers, it already tells me that mine are the most current version so I wonder if this is something I should contact microsoft about. Also there's no way to install this plugin for maya regardless of the version?

I'm kind of disappointed because it used to work just fine and toying around with designs on the go was great for me. You're probably right about it being hardware though, this same install works just fine on my tower which runs on a 2080rtx, 32gb of ram and an i9 9900k processor. I'm almost curious if it would be worth upgrading to a newer surface pro model that would have better specs and hardware? I appreciate the help.

[brentmc]

Hi,

IMO there is no real way to tell in advance if newer hardware will work better when the software predates the hardware by so many years. In general, most software needs to be updated to support newer OS and hardware.
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Brent