Modify Marking Menu Distance/Sensitivity

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

Is there a setting or variable anywhere I can adjust to fix the distance I have to drag my mouse to get inside a sub marking-menu.

It's easier to show what I mean in a video. In the attached video I am trying to trigger the "Soften Edge" command in a marking menu sub-menu. When I try and draw a small V it only grabs polyBevel, I have to draw a very large V shape before Soften Edge is picked up. This happens with all of the items in sub-menus.

I don't think this is Maya version specific, I think it's an issue with my particular setup. I can't put my finger on when it started but I have tried:

* New graphics drivers (396.xx up to 398.11, will be trying a rollback next)

* Deleting preferences

* Disabling every single plugin

* Re-installing Maya 2018.3 (problem seemed present in 2018.2 as well)

* Disabling any screen hooks/overlay software

* Making sure my monitor was running at native resolution (1920x1080, 100% scaling)

* Making sure Maya was running at normal DPI (96), and also tested "No Scaling" in interface options.

* Adjusting my mouse settings (I use a gaming mouse so I disabled all game features & set my DPI to a reasonable level and played with the Windows setting)

* I tried enabling 4K downscaling to my FHD monitor and this seemed to help but I couldn't stand the blurriness everywhere.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what caused it to change. I just remember discovering this issue when I was trying to create some custom marking menus but I wasn't sure when it started.

Are there any known reported issues with this?

My work PC on Maya 2017.5 is fine.

Cheers

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous and welcome to the community!

It doesn't look like a major issue is occurring.

If anything it looks like your simply moving your mouse to quick. The distance itself shouldn't affect the marking menu appearing it's more that you have to wait a half second for the initial menu to appear before drawing over the Soften/Harden tab and then select soften edge.

If this is a huge issue for you you could always simply assign a hotkey to soften edge so you can skip this entirely.

Please let me know if this information makes sense 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!

[Anonymous]

Hi Sean,

I'm not new just using my non-work account 😛

I know I'm being picky, but unfortunately that solution doesn't really work for me and it's a bit disappointing hearing that since it has always been a valuable selling point of Maya. My Maya workflow has always been to use the marking menus in this way and I have never had to drag this far to get to a tool before. One of the main reasons I love Maya is because of these marking menus instead of hotkeys. There's plenty of videos online of people swiping around through the menus like I demonstrate and it's working fine.

Like I said towards the end of my post, it's also working as I expect in Maya 2017.5 on my work machine. I've attached a video of me attempting the same things on my work machine and you can clearly see I don't need to move the mouse as far.

Also at home, when I downsample from 4K to FHD it seems to fix it. So there's no hidden High-DPI mode or something in Maya's viewports that may be turning on by mistake?

Seeing that no one else has the issue I'm guessing I've got some unique peculiarity occurring on my machine. I might try rolling back to 2018.1 (or even 2017) just to double check if it is the version of Maya.

Cheers

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Sorry that my previous suggestion isn't helpful.

I was writing this post and I went back to Maya to do a bit more testing and I think I picked up on something that might help you.

I noticed if you hold shift and then right click and start to drag immediately I can get the long draw lines that are apparent in your video.

However, if I hold shift and right click without moving my mouse then the menu immediately appears and you can do the short movement like normal.

It also looks like there are just delays on occasion where the menu may take another half second then longer to appear.

If you don't mind, try playing around with it a bit via the suggestions I provided and let me know if you notice any changes on your set up.

It's possible this may just be by design and how Maya is interacting with certain monitors but if this doesn't help at all I'll pass this along to our devs so they can take a look at it and confirm whether its an issue with Maya and/or by design.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sean,

I think there's some misunderstanding about what I'm aiming to achieve here so I'll take a moment to clear it up.

On this page:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/fil...

The 3rd paragraph down states (emphasis mine):

Marking menus are very fast for experienced users because once you get used to showing them and the positions of their items, you can select the items using very quick gestures with the mouse or tablet pen, sometimes so fast the entire menu won’t even display.

This is the behaviour I'm familiar with and I demonstrate it in Maya 2017.5 in the attachment of my previous message.

To clarify, the speed at which the menus appear is not at fault here, just the gestural aspect of the marking menus. For some reason, my gestures have to be a lot larger on my 2018.3 home PC than on my work 2017.5 PC. It used to work fine on my home PC about two months ago.

In further troubleshooting news, I rolled back the driver to one from 2017 (when I know for sure it was working!) and that hasn't resolved the issue. I also reverted Maya 2018.3 back to 2018.1 (where I again knew it was working) and it still isn't resolved. I also made sure I was running the old graphics driver AND the older Maya version simultaneously.

So it:

Is not Maya version specific

Is not graphics driver specific

Is affected by the output resolution of my graphics card

Is not affected by altering the sensitivity of my mouse

Is not caused by any game/graphics overlay programs such as Steam or Nvidia GeForce Experience (Unless they're still enabled when they're exited, which is still likely)

The only other remaining thing I think it could be is the Windows 10 1803/4 April Update -- Which I will not be able to test since I already removed my previous version of Windows.

I might try a system restore and hope I have a point old enough to try it. I also might try re-installing mouse drivers just on the off chance that helps.

If possible, some developer intervention would be nice, maybe there's an API call somewhere that allows me to modify the input (I'll go digging too). For now all I can do is learn to live without more complex mouse gestures and hope that maybe one day the problem will go away.

Cheers

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Ahhhh ok! Thanks so much for explaining in detail!

I've never actually just tried doing the sheer motion like that more just waiting for the menus to appear hence why I didn't exactly see a problem at first.

Now I tried this a good dozen times doing the motion quickly and had no issues on Maya 2018.3 so I believe you are correct and it may be down to a GPU issue.

However it is also possible it could be due to Windows Update and/or game overlays like you mentioned. I personally know how pesky Geforce can be even when you "close" it but then again I don't totally believe that would be causing an issue like this.

That said, I'm also on a 4k monitor and don't have any settings changed display wise or in Maya and I'm not noticing this issue which further leads me to believe its with your GPU.

Can you check if the driver you're currently on is on our supported hardware list?

You can find our certified hardware list here!

Finally, if the driver is on that list and this issue is still occurring, I'll be more than happy to pass this along to our developers so they can take a look and begin working on a fix if it is indeed necessary.

Sorry again for the confusion!

[Anonymous]

Hi Sean,

Not to worry about the confusion, I do some tech support myself so can appreciate the work!

My graphics card is a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and isn't listed there, but other cards in the same series are and recommend installing driver ver. 390.77. I installed this and the issue still persists.

Currently it looks like my best solution is to buy a higher resolution monitor. I suppose it's a good excuse now, ha!

Cheers

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Thanks for the info! I'll pass this along to our devs and let you know if they know of a workaround or not!

[Anonymous]

Hi Sean,

Just friendly chasing up on this, have there been other similar reports? Or a workaround?

Currently I'm just waiting for the MM's to reveal and use them that way currently but it's a little slower than I'm used to.

Cheers

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Nothing yet. I haven't seen any forum posts or phone cases related to this and no one else has attached a similar customer issue to our report.

That said I'll continue to keep an eye on it and let you know if anything changes!

[Anonymous]

Having exact same problem since upgrading to win 10(from 7) and gpu to gtx 1080ti (from(gtx1060)

Have to make much larger gestures to trigger the correct commands. It's very debilitating and frustrating to work with, especially in uv editor.

Maya 2018.5

Windows 10  1809

Geforce gtx 1080ti  latest drivers

Wondering if the original poster found a solution or workaround to this since the last post.

[Anonymous]

Hello!

 I was wondering if someone found a solution for this.
I've been using maya for more than 10 years and this issue, is really slowing me down.
I know it sounds like a small problem, but it's actually very frustrating

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

Regrettably I didn't find a resolution to this issue, I did however get a higher DPI monitor and it did help the issue a lot.

Pure speculation here but it seems like at some point the developers made a conscious decision to fix over-sensitivity of the marking menu's on hi-dpi screens since most professionals use a better class of screen these days, however on my older monitor it meant that the sensitivity was severely reduced.

One thing people here could try would be to render to a 4K output and then downscale it to your native resolution. You can do this in Nvidia control panel or AMD's control centre. If you trick the software into thinking you have a hi-dpi display the marking menus might work better.

Another thing could be to check if there are any third party windowing tools such as FancyZones or AltDrag potentially causing the issue.

Unfortunately I don't own a copy of Maya anymore so I can't check to see if any of this helps.