My dude is massive! Aka maya object scaled way up on import

Asset & Content Management
1

Hey guys,

My artist and I are using Maya 2009, we’re dropping the maya binary files right into the assets folder.

We’ve verified that the artist is working in meters by checking the settings of each of our assets.

I’ve attached a screenshot of our settings for the main character in Maya.

Our main character is 1.75-ish meters high in Maya. I want to set all of the assets import scales to 1 to be sure that objects in Unity are the exact scale the artist intended, however when I import the main character and other objects they are massive, many times bigger than in Maya.

Searching around on the forums I saw one Unity developer say the following:

"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."

Is this still an accurate statement? Does this mean that our change in the settings is being ignored by the importer and his scale in meters is suddenly being scaled as if it were centimeters?

It seems weird to me that the importer would ignore the unit size settings.

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2

Hello.

Export via FBX and set the units to centimetres. Meters in Maya, centimetres on export, and it should be to scale. :slight_smile:

E.

3

I use Maya 2009 and export in centimeters. Then your scale factor will be 1. Other wise if you use meters then use a scale factor of .01

4

I have similar problem here…
And the most crazy in Maya is you can’t edit the default in your preferences.
You can switch to “cm” value, it will save your pref if you click on the save button… But when relaunching Maya it will switch again on this default parameter…

Anyway…

First close your Maya.

You can open this file :
…MyDocument/Maya/YourMayaVersion/prefs/userpref.mel

Do a research on the 2 following strings :

  • workingUnitLinear
  • workingUnitLinearDefault

And you will find this 2 lines :

  • -sv “workingUnitLinear” “cm”
  • -sv “workingUnitLinearDefault” “cm”

If the “cm” value is “m” on one of this 2 lines, change to “cm” as well!

And here we go, you will not have more problem for exeporting 3D on Unity, etc…

And start Maya for checking the parameters.

I currently have the same problem for exporting a character to an Unity programmer…
…then I get tired and doing some tools for erasing all pref when exporting with Maya as FBX file ^_^…

5

Thanks for the tip, very good to know.

I do reiterate though that it seems strange for Unity to apply this hidden scale. Better to use what the artist intends IMO.

6

And if the problem continu…
…create a button with this 2 lines in Maya and click on it before exporting :

optionVar -sv "workingUnitLinear" "cm";
optionVar -sv "workingUnitLinearDefault" "cm";

It only works for the current scene, it doesn’t save any preferences in the userpref file