(Copied from original User Voice forum)
"...working with real world units is still a pain in maya, if you want to do things real scale something like a big architectural scene maya got issues with the clipping planes, even if you make them larger on the camera settings still the manipulators get messed up, it becomes really uncomfortable to work with, all the tools should use real world units as well, for example if you do a bevel you should specify the width of the bevel in cm or whatever units you are working with, same with displacement heigths, 3dsmax does this and is really usefull and a adaptive grid option would be nice as well, if you get too far from the grid it will turn all gray and useless."
"Agreed 100%! And PLEASE show the unit besides the numbers, sometimes the users just don´t know if they are entering samples, centimeters, an angle or just an arbitrary value. This is really lacking in Maya now.
Lightwave and Modo are the best applications in this regard, even making automatic translations in the input box, if you enter the unit besides the magnitude. Really handy!"
"Most definitely. Renderers work in world scale units. And what's really annoying is that some features in Maya work in metres instead of cm so you have to remember which feature uses what scale and multiply/divide to suit. Really annoying, unintuitive and just adds more time to workflow when not necessary."
"This is my #1 disappointment about Maya. For most VFX needs, working in Meters is just the most logical and natural. It should "just work"."
"Custom scale for fbx export: Maya has problems working with large objects in real world scale. It already has options to export into different units, but these always make the model smaller. We need to be able to set the scale manually so that our models are the proper size in other programs."
"An object (like the distancetool) or a parameter that give the real life reference size. This could be used by maya, mentalray, plugins. Think for example of an automating sizing of the leather wood ocean textures, paint effects. Also usefull for physics engines and all mentalray physical simulations, and more."
"Working meters instead of cm is a nightmare, especialy when doing an architectural project with large scales : ortho views are bugging, the clipping plane is crasy, values become ridiculous (a value of 0.001 become 0.00001), bevel doesn't work etc. It's a classic bug in maya, and working in cm as meters is a really ugly thing to do, especially when it comes to rendering because you must translate all the values to get physically correct result."
