when changing display options like vertex numbers, backface culling etc, the viewport should update this immediately. At the moment it's very buggy and difficult to manage as there are different settings in the preferences and display options, that often work in combination in order for it to take effect.    displaying certain features in the viewport should be an easy toggle that can be turned off and on reliably without having to restart maya, duplicate objects or dive into the main preferences. Show More

Hello,  I've started using XGen interactive now and testing if it could be used for production. It's great how flexible Interactive Grooming is for concepting, but when it comes to feed the groom back in to the pipeline it is vital that the "heaviness" of the groom (which comes from the density) is manageable. I briefly look through the forum and Autodesk website but there doesn't seem to be any function or way of finding the hairstrand count within the plugin. We used a 3rd party software to find it but ideally there should be a way of just clicking/previewing the hairstrand count within XGen Grooming. Would that be something you could implement in the next update? Show More

Menuitems are grouped according to the function they perform. For example, the Boolean , Combine , and Separate menuitem are combined in the Combine group of the Mesh menu. These and other menuitems are shown all the time even though users are not interested in them, occupying precious screen real estate. So I think it would be a good idea for a group of menuitems to be able to collapse to save the screen space, leaving only the group label being displayed. When collapse, the menuitems in this group can be expanded if the mouse hovers over the group label for two or three seconds. In addition, we can add an icon on the right side of the label for a user to explicitly collapse or expand menuitems group, for example, a double down-arrow or up-arrow. This icon can alternate according to the current collapse/expanded state of the group. Hope this idea can be adopted. Thank you. Show More

In a viewport window under Show I can select what types of objects I want to display(Controllers, NURBS Curves, etc.) Oftentimes I want to only see maybe 2 or three types, so I want to deselect all by hitting "None" and then at the same time without the menu closing reselect a couple of object types, say Polygons and Lights. Currently I need to reopen the menu, tick one object type. The menu closes. The reopen again etc.. In Softimage you could just use shift while the menu is open and select or deselect as many types as wanted before closing the menu. Show More

This would be quite the change, of course, but change Maya to no longer be name-dependent for its nodes.   It would really speed up user's workflow if we didn't have to be so concerned about manually typing in extensions to node names ("george_grp" and "george_curve").   Then for scripting, Autodesk could come up with a consistent, internal naming convention for object extensions.   So if I have a group and a curve both named "george," and say Maya's official extention for groups is "_grp" and "_crv" (or something like that), then the user just has to apply the appropriate extension types while scripting to avoid naming conflicts.   It appears Maya already has a way to internally distinguish between objects, since it assigns the appropriate icon to each object, and I've never seen that break, even if I attempt to rename everything "george."   Cheers, Nathan Show More

This used to be there on the mental ray mip_matteShadow material and it’s an integrated feature in many render engines (redshift for example has it in the shape node of every object). It’ s a simple but key command for integration. Please, add this button to the aiShadowMatte material or to the shape node of the objects (in the primary visibility, visible in reflection, etc tab). Show More

The Outliner shows object names in greyed-out text when they are hidden, so it conveys the show/hide state, but the show/hide state itself cannot be changed from the Outliner. It is possible to hide *node names from the Outliner node list*, but traditionally showing/hiding an object in the scene view isn't possible.   It would be cool if you could right-click on a node in Outliner and show/hide it in the actual scene view. Show More

I think this feature is useful for students learning OpenGL programming. Usually the homework or course project asks students to use existing models like bunny or teapot to work with some OpenGL tasks like lighting or rendering. But sometimes the students are free to use whatever model s/he likes. It is tedious and error-prone to write hard-coded coordinates into C/C++ codes to describe the model. How nice it would be if I can create the model inside Maya and export the coordinates directly by clicking a menuitem! My idea pushes this convenience one step further, inspired by the interface Maya has already provided for Unity and Unreal. I hope there is a menuitem File | Send to Visual Studio | All or Selection. If I click it, Maya can create a Visual Studio 2015 C/C++ Project which contains OpenGL codes and automatically invoke Visual Studio to open it. When I run the project in VS, it can display exactly the scene or selected objects in Maya (based on whether All or Selection was chosen). Furthermore, Maya can provide options to better control the generation of OpenGL code, such as what OpenGL version to use, what VS version to use (VS2015 or VS2017), whether the glm library call should be included, whether to use GLFW 3.2.1 or the legacy GLUT ... etc. This feature will not only make OpenGL coding convenient, but also provide a good model to learn OpenGL programming for students, so I hope it could be added in a future version of Maya. Thank you. Show More

Sometimes we need to render an animation of a scene in which only a small portion is changing in each frame of the sequence. For example, we want to render a realistic human face in which only eyes are blinking or moving. Other parts of the scene like mouth, cheek, forehead, hair, etc., are not changed at all during the whole animation. Though one may argue that there is no absolutely still object according to perhaps philosophy, at least this is the case for some special applications, for example, rendering out a synthesized motion for psychological or perception experiments. In these circumstances, we typically have to render the whole scene in which more than 70% of an output image is identical across the whole animation sequence. I think it is a waste of rendering computation. Only the first frame needs to be rendered, and all the subsequent frames can be obtained by simply copying the imaging outcome of the first frame. To facilitate this, Maya (or Arnold) UI can provide a specific dialog so that users can specify a region which will be rendered every frame, or inversely, a region that remains the same in every frame except the first one. Then Maya will save the users' time by rendering only what needs to render in each node of the render farm, duplicating the still portion of the scene from the first frame, and finally compositing the region of interest rendered with still portion together to form the final output image.   This idea comes directly from practical use case of Maya, so I believe this partial rendering capability with copy and composite may be needed by many other users. Hoping Autodesk can consider my idea. Thank you for voting. Show More

Hi all Please reinstate the above. I have hundreds of pieces of geometry which need to be removed from certain render layers. In previous Maya versions, we could select all the pieces and then right click 'remove…' from render layers. What took seconds to do in previous versions of Maya, is now taking hours. Forum post: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-shading-lighting-and/render-setup-ren'right click remove'der-layers-workings/m-p/8024648/highlight/false Also, have all the Maya feedback threads been added to this new page? Old feedback page: https://mayafeedback.autodesk.com/ Cheers Steve Show More

The channel box contains the SRT info and attributes. It also contains an objects' inputs and the old render layers.    - Considering the old render layers are old, they don't really need priority on screen all the time, amirite? -The inputs aren't procedural by any modern standard, so they're pretty pointless too. The only one you tend to touch is the most recent input. - Let's say you're working on an object and want to use soft selection, change to world-mode, object-mode, component-mode, preserve children, tweak mode etc. Every time you do this, you have to dip into the attribute editor. Firstly, this is incredibly frustrating seeing it requires more clicks. And secondly your viewport gets readjusted because the tool settings slides out twice as far. (unnecessarily reducing your viewport size) Which you then have to move back when you change to the channel box again in order to regain a normal sized viewport.   -Would it not be better to put the SRT tool settings in the chanel box, in the space that has now been made free because of my previous suggestions? (and prefereably keep the channel box the same size as it is now)   - The history inputs of an object (and this alone is a much discussed issue in how maya handles them), could be a button in the channel box aswell, called 'inputs' or history'. It then lists the inputs (in a slightly better way than the current right-click -> inputs)   Softimage had this workflow dooooowwwwnnnn      Show More

A toggle to isolate select an object in a component mode and object mode.  Show More

When using designing and creative software like Maya, users often need to fixate their eyes on a small spot of a large screen for details adjustments. It is distractive and interruptive at this moment to have to click some UI elements like menu items or tool buttons located somewhere else because users have to move their eyes to guide the mouse pointer. As a result, I (and many others) use keyboard shortcuts for the same purpose. Although keyboard shortcuts are better than mouse in terms of avoiding operation distraction, sometimes we still have to take a look at the keyboard because we are not sure where our fingers are. A wrong key stroke might be troublesome or even disastrous. Secondly, we can't keep our hands above keyboard all the time because we have to move mouse. Also, we might wanna give our hands a break just because we are tired. At this moment, it would be so nice if Maya can recognize our speech command like "Lasso tool" or "Snap to grids", or shortcuts like "W", "E" to switch operation mode. Hope my idea can be adopted because that could really make the operation inside Maya more convenient. Show More

Hello, I would like you to allow Maya to read Protein 2.0 textures. Our conpany has been using 3ds Max for 10 years now and we added Maya users to our workforce about five years in, since we discovered Maya works with vray too and is popular among 3d designers. The problem is we used to work with sketchup so sending it to either Maya or Max for rendering was not a big deal since both software could read the materials. We started to move to revit recently, because we felt it was better and that we could keep our workflow within Autodesk but I find that the Maya users still have to export their models to Sketchup and re- apply all the textures before sending it to Maya to render because apparently Maya cannot read protein 2.0 but Max can. I am faced with a decision. Do i stop buying the Maya application and stick to only Max? Or wait till you develop Maya far enough to read protein 2.0? I really do suggest you add this to your to- do list to make the revit- maya workflow a bit easier and faster; preferably without having to go through sketchup first Show More

I hope Maya can support Microsoft Direct X so that I can work at home.   Logic line: - I want to work at home Who doesn't? -> I don't have a fast enough machine at home to do modeling and rendering Don't forget that a majority of Maya users are poor students. A $3000 graphics workstation is a difficulty for them. -> But they have access to a powerful machine in the lab Well, it is the case sometimes. -> ... and they like to use Windows Again, it is the case sometimes though many people refuse to admit that. -> But Remote Desktop disables OpenGL, so Maya can't launch ... unless it has already started, but crash happens anytime. However, Direct X works fine with RDP, so now you understand my idea. People don't usually change, like the habit of working at home, like the habit of using Windows, so why not Maya change? A good design should abstract the higher-level application logic from the underlying details of graphics library. Unity is an example.   Show More