Maya Feet to Inches HUD Script Takes the Pain out of Working to Scale

The popularity and direction of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) dictates that your scene is better off in some sort of real world scale. This is also true for previs artist who need to constantly work in real world units to match the sets and positioning that they are working with.

Working to Scale in Maya

The problem is that Maya’s ability to work with scale effectively is a bit lacking. You will find this especially if you are used to working with applications that have a much better scaling workflow intended for architectural visualizations, such as 3ds Max, or 3ds Max design. There is simply no good way to manage scale, or pop back and forth from different scale settings easily in Maya.

The problem is that Maya’s ability to work with scale effectively is a bit lacking

Lack of Scale Workflow

The issue then arrises when modeling things like sets or scenes that have both large spaces and objects along side smaller objects, it makes sense to switch your scale out to model each. If you don’t you end up doing lots of conversion maths, or keeping some sort of converter to translate your numbers for object sizes back in forth.

As an example, if you are building a room, (and you are in the USA) obviously feet make sense but if you need to model something smaller adhering to scale, you need to convert that smaller number into feet to be able to do that. You then end up with some decimal number that is not very intuitive to work with.

You are able to perform simple mathematic functions in most numeric fields in Maya, however you need to know the conversion scale off hand to know what numbers to do that math with.

Feet to Inches HUD Script

Creating a workflow tool for moving freely from one scale to the other, Previs Artist Matt Workman shares his script that will switch from different scale settings, and also offers a Heads Up Display in the viewport for reference.

Previs Artist Matt Workman shares his script that will switch from different scale settings

The Feet to Inches HUD for Maya will also change the viewport grid upon switching, making it visually easy to see the relationship between the two scales, in this case, feet and inches.

the headache is managing the conversion from feet to inches.  So I wrote this script to help making it easier to swtich between the two in MayaMatt Workman – mattworkman.com

The Feet to Inches HUD actually performs three things. It creates a HUD for the viewport in the bottom left corner that displays the current “linear Unit” that you are working in. It also provides a floating interface panel that will give you a one click toggle between feet and inches.

The script will also update the grid, changing the feet setting to an easily viewed 1’ x 1’ grid, and for inches, keeps the same 1’ x 1’ grid with further divisions.

Matt notes that the Feet to Inches HUD for Maya is a smaller part to a larger project. Matt is working away on a Camera Manager for Maya, that will offer a custom HUD and Reticle system. The  Feet Inches HUD represents the first step in scripting the heads up display.