Maya preferences

Unity Engine
1

Hi to all,

I hav my Maya preferences set at it’s default: centimeters, this is ok to use within Unity?
to easy use of the scripts like gravity, ect…

Sorry if this is a stupid question

2

There are no stupid questions :smile:

The mass of a object is only affected by the value in the rigidbody inspector. Mesh size doesnt have much to do with mass besides where the center is. So you can easyly have one object thats larger then the other but the larger object might have less mass. Mass is also what gravity affects. So yeah it doesnt matter what your units are.

Bill

3

Many thanks sync1b,

This will help me

4

In theory you are right. In practice it is quite a bit different. Mass doesn’t change how fast an object falls. However, scale does and A LOT.

Ok actually, it doesn’t change the velocity, but it changes how you perceive it.

Think about an object that is huge, like a 200 meter tall super-human.
If he stands on earth he will fall with the same velocity as a 2 meter big human does. They will fall equally fast.

But what you perceive is that the 200 meter big human will fall his own size after around 10 seconds. Where as the 2 meter big guy will have reached his own size at around 1 second.

So for all that matters, the small guy seems to fall a lot faster.

So when you do physics getting the scale right is absolutely critical! If you get it wrong, the physics will feel like things are floating or are too heavy.

If you make a human make sure he is around 2 meters big in unity. You can change the scale of imported objects in the Import Settings… global scale.

You can compare it against the default cube which is always 1 meter big.

In regards to maya and size. Maya uses centimeters. But most people don’t care and model as if it was meters. Thus when we import maya files we treat it as if it was in meters.

So in maya just make your human be 2 units (centimeters) big and you will be fine.

5

Aha! For quite some time I’ve been wondering about units within Unity. Is this hidden away in any of the official Unity documentation?

Knowing that a cube is one meter square allows for the creation of measuring sticks within the editor. This is a trick I would use when modeling within Second Lfe.

6

Here’s one mention of it (Read the section called Use the right size)

It’s also mentioned in the reference documentation on Mesh import settings.

7

Hi,

This is very helpfull. When I have my full scene working, I would make a Maya step by step tutorial for the artist like me.

Thank you

8

Thanks!

In theory, the official docs are built from the tikiwiki. (At least, that was my understanding.) However, things in the tikiwiki don’t seem to always make it out of the wiki. Should the tikiwiki be considered part of the official docs? Is there any sort of roadmap or build schedule for the Unity documentation?

9

The extracted documentation is usually updated at the same time as OTEE releases new versions. Things on the tikiwiki that are not in the extracted documentation is thus written after the last release.

The reason why it is not updated more often is to avoid having the documentation mention features not present in the current version of Unity, and to ensure the on-line version matches the one distributed together with the Unity install.