I’ve went step by step through the Maya tutorial page and I feel I have a good grasp on everything. However, I have some questions I cant quite find the answers too. I’ve been going through forums on modeling to “real world scale” but it just doesn’t look right in maya… I did not change unit size because I heard it causes problems down the line. I have 1 unit = 1 centimeter.

For example, if I were to model a 5 story building (50 feet) I would create a cube 1524 centimeters tall. Is that correct? This size of the building compared to the grid is outrageous. It doesn’t seem right…

Maybe this is a stupid question but I’d like to know I’m doing this correctly before I finish and it’s wrong. If anyone could help I’d really appreciate it. Thank you.

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Setting a different scale works, but there are a few functions (such as the HIK Skeleton Generator) that misbehave in other than centimeter scales. But pretty much all of the basic modeling functions work fine.

If you don’t want to change to meters, or something else (in which case your building will still be disproportional to the grid) change the grid size. Click the square options box in the Display -> Grid menu and change the length and width parameter from 12 to 1200 and the gridlines every parameter from 5 to 500 and zoom out and your scene will look the same as if you had set meters.

When using large scales, sometimes you have to set the “far clip plane” value in the camera attributes to a larger value. You will know you need to do this if the far part of the grid (or your model) just fades out in the distance. I generally set the near plane to 0.1 and the far plane to 10000. that seems to work well for both small models and large buildings.

<* Wes *>

Man, you asked this same question a bunch of times. I answered it once, try and find it. :)

<* Wes *>

Thank you Wes and I apologize for the numerous posts. I realized I shouldn’t have afterwards and couldn’t delete them.

I was using the grid as a reference to show how big the building is. My main concern is scale. Is it correct to model the building at real world size, if so the size of the building in my attachment is correct and I can move on?

If you or anyone could explain modeling to real world scale or how they scale while modeling in general that would be awesome. Thanks again!

Scale is always a relative thing. If you are making multiple things that have to go together, then having them all made (or converted) to the same scale is mandatory if they are to be used together, as in a rendering or a game engine. Or whatever.

An absolute scale would be important if you were sending a file to somewhere that had specified an exact scale. But in general, an exact scale is not important, so long as you know enough to make all of the parts that go together be scaled relative to each other.

Example, you can leave Maya in centimeters and pretend it is meters. Make your building 15 units tall. Make the guy that will stand in front of it 1.7 units tall, and so on. Your visual result will be the same as if you had made the building 1500 units tall and the guy 170.

Seems like most (or at least a lot) of the game engines anymore have moved to FBX format, and some more to COLLADA. Exporting through FBX or COLLADA allows you to convert units. Multipliers such as 100, .01 and so on are applied during the export process to change the scale.

The real determinant as to what to do is to look at the end product you want to produce and have that drive your actions. I personally usually leave Maya in centimeters and pretend it is meters, making all my characters about 1.7 units tall, my buildings about 3 meters/story, and so on. But I will say that is not necessarily better than modeling in real centimeters, just more convenient, because I know I can convert the scale of any exported files easily. And also, I am not doing any architectural visualization work, just game and video projects, which will all work just fine as long as everything is scaled relative to everything else.

<* Wes *>