Fixing Maya’s camera focus

Sometimes Maya camera gets corrupted and when you try to focus on objects it just goes really far away and usually this behavior persists on all scenes you open from there on.

A quick way that has worked for me to fix it is to first close all open Maya sessions, then find your userPrefs.mel file and search for this line:

-fv "defaultFitFactor" 0

Just change the value to 1 and it should fix your issue.

If you don’t want to edit the file directly you can run the following MEL command inside Maya:

optionVar -fv "defaultFitFactor" 1;

Or the alternative Python command:

from maya import cmds
cmds.optionVar( fv=('defaultFitFactor', 1) )

When applying any of these fixes make sure there is only the current Maya session running or you might overwrite the fix by closing a Maya session that still has the old value set.

Simplest way I know for measuring distances in Maya

Alright let’s kickstart this blog with something really simple and fast 🙂

SO… when doing correctives, limb stretching or any kind of setup we need to be able to measure distances between points, right? I’m going to share how I’ve been doing it since forever. I’m actually proud of this one since it was one of the first “techniques” I discovered myself when I started rigging without being told or following tutorials.

STEP 1
You’re going to create 2 empty transforms (groups) and 1 distanceBetween node.

Name them however you want to make things clear. I usually name them:
“(name of what I’m measuring)_start“
“(name of what I’m measuring)_end“

To create a distanceBetween node just write it on the node editor or use a command:
createNode distanceBetween
cmds.createNode( 'distanceBetween' )

STEP 2
Connect the .translate attributes of both groups into the distanceBetween .input attributes.

STEP 3
Select both transforms and hit Ctrl+G to group, rename it.

STEP 4
Do a scaleConstraint of the master/global/SRT control of your rig. You know, the one you use to move around and scale the entire character.

PROFIT
And now were done! Do pointConstraints in the start and end transforms to whatever you’re trying to measure the distance. (for example to the elbow and wrist controllers)

Now you can safely use the distanceBetween.distance attribute to drive stretching or correctives as you need to. Since the parent group where both transforms are located is constrained to the master_ctrl space, the distance value will always be reliable and you don’t need to compensate anything when scaling, since the translate values will be the same. In another words, the scale constraint

That works even in non-uniform scaling… don’t believe me? Scale the master_ctrl using any combination of sx, sy, sz and track the value of the distanceBetween.distance. Just keep this setup as simple as possible in a separate location of the moveable rig and you should be safe. 🙂

Happy measuring!

Stay a while and listen

After a 8 year hiatus, I’m back!

I was looking back at my old blog using web.archive and felt very nostalgic, it was nice reading some things I wrote and remembering how it felt like to be young again 🙂

So I registered this WordPress website and hopefully I’ll be posting things that I find interesting in my 3d journey and perhaps some tutorials like old times? Probably silly stuff 🙂 it’s been a while and I learned a bunch, so it might be interesting.

Thanks for reading!