I made a building in 3ds max with the correct size. I imported it to maya and it was way off. Where can I setup units in maya?

In theory unit conversion is unessicary. 1 Unit in Radiant = 1 Unit in Inch (Maya) however this is not entirely true. Radiant dosent use the world values of a model (the location of verticies) to plot it out it uses the scale of the model to scale it against the world units of Radiant. This is an entirely different practice than what is traditionally practiced so its not hard to imagine people acidentaly freezing transformations.

An easy way to fix it is to create a cube and scale it to the dimensions of your house, ONLY scale do not manipulate edges or verts. And parent your model to the box, then freeze the transforms again and then unparent. This gives your model the correct scale it needs to be exported.

If by some reason your model has a negative scale value you need to correct it by freezing the transforms (scaleXYX=1) and inverting the bad value and repeating the process.

once you've fixed the values make sure your origin is at the world origin or when you import your model the prefab marker (and its world origin) won't be in the rite place.

though to answer your question, Windows>Settings=Preferences Settings= World Units

the "Settings" tab is where you also adjust the up axsis. reopen your model once you've changed the settings to assure they are correct.

the same thing goes for changing measurements, remember that 1Radiant unit = 1 Inch(maya) you still might need to scale accordingly.

edited on Feb. 23, 2008 12:00 am by ryokukitsune

From what I've been reading, it doesn't sound like making a building in maya (or max) is worth it, building it out of brushes is actually pretty quick, and the UV & collision work are done automatically. Plus it sounds like it will compile faster & better with brushes made in radiant. If you have something thats especially complex, that would prob be worth doing outside of radiant, but the rest of the building is prob better off being built in radiant. I think you will prob run into a lot of problems trying to import a building.

Theres a bunch of great video (and text) tutorials in the CoD1 section to get you started.

edited on Feb. 23, 2008 12:34 am by swordinstone

Well he does bring up a good point, unless you are working on a background prop there really isn’t a reason to make a FULL building in maya. Maya should be used for detail work such as creating blown out walls awnings and other details you just can’t yank out of radiant.

However if you do intend to do work in maya there is a plugin which can export the Map format so you can quickly create prefabs and such in maya though it has its limitations though I wouldn’t know anything about it sine my version of maya is incompatible and I have no intention of downgrading for this script since I have yet to get it to work (8.5 and 2k8)

If you’d like to give it a shot it can be found here, scroll down to the bottom of the page for a link.

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5704

ryokukitsune writes...

The Maya plugins work no problem with 8.5 Just follow the instructions as you would for 8. It works fine.