Working with Large scale scenes - Initial set up

[Anonymous]

Hello all,

I have a question regarding scene set up in terms of set up and scale, so for example I wished to design a game level say a mayan ruin scene which would be quite large, how would I go about scaling this in Maya to a workable size?

Im aware of how to change the plane from CM to Meters etc, but once its in meters is the industry standard to actually model in maya as exact life-like dimensions and have to adjust the clipping etc, or is it perfectly acceptable to model a large scene to any size and not worry about that aspect of it.

The only concern I have is in the long run I would like to get into environment art, and I don't want to start modelling very small and then find out later that because of this it will knock off any lighting or rendering settings which may make it look unrealistic since I wasn't working to a lifelike scale, or having to find out later I need to scale everything up and any textures may be low resolution following that decision.

Im pretty new to the full Maya software itself but have previously used Cinema 4D for many years in various things but wanting to move into more industry standard practicing and understanding to make sure everything is as clean as possible.

Many thanks.

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

In Maya for Animation / Modeling "cm" behave as "cm" but for FX "cm" will be treated as "m", this is not consistent in Maya and one of the most asked features to be corrected.

It's on you which way you choose, but it's a lot easier to scale independent models than to scale a dynamic simulation.:

"is it perfectly acceptable to model a large scene to any size and not worry about that aspect of it"

Yes.

Using default units as "m" (although it's named "cm") should provide the fewest problems (there are also tools that have problems when using units other than default), but again, you can scale everything later and adapt values also for simulations when using other units than default.