MayaMan Help Contents

# MayaMan Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q)

This page lists common questions or problems people have when using MayaMan, and the solutions. If you are having a problem you should check for a solution here before emailing support@al.com.au

Q: The MayaMan menu is not visible in Maya
A: The MayaMan menu only appears when Maya is in 'Rendering' mode, and only when the MayaMan plugin is loaded. Look under the Plugin Manager to make sure MayaMan is being loaded. You can set it to auto-load here too, so that it is loaded whenever you start Maya. MayaMan's location should be listed in the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH environment variable, and MayaMan's 'mel' subdirectory should be in the MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH environment variable.

Q: Some of my objects are disappearing when I render
A: The objects may be too close to the camera, in which case you should get a warning message in the command console during rendering to this effect (eyesplits is a likely culprit with PRman). Otherwise, try disabling the MayaMan camera clipping optimisation which attempts to cilp anything behind or outside of the camera view frustrum (unless needed for reflections, etc)... see EnableCameraClipping.

Q: My particles are not showing up in a MayaMan render
You need to turn on the particle disk cache when rendering particles with MayaMan. MayaMan renders each frame separately, and asks Maya for the particle positions at each frame, and Maya will give incorrect results unless you have a disk cache enabled.

Q: My dynamics/particles are not working in a MayaMan Batch render
For some strange reason if a scene does not have a brush in it dynamics don't get updated properly in batch mode which often manifests itself as a failure of particles to move properly. If this is the case you can create a brush by entering createNode brush in the mel command-line window. The brush doesn't have to do anything... it just has to exist.

Q: The image framing in my MayaMan render is quite different to a Maya render
We're aware of quite a few known issues with camera matching, try to stay away from film offsets and lens squeeze and you'll avoid the worst of it.

Q: Some object driven by dynamics/IK motion blur but others do not
Sometimes maya moves objects around by moving their vertex locations rather than manipulating their transform node, you may need to turn on vertex blur.

Q: I have multiple cameras in my scene, and MayaMan is using the wrong one when rendering
Maya doesn't have a simple setting for which camera to use. It renders through any cameras that have the 'renderable' attribute set. Maya can render multiple view simultaneously, but MayaMan will not. If you have multiple cameras in your scene which are set to be renderable, then MayaMan will use the first one it encounters when scanning the scene. If you have no additional renderable cameras in your scene, the perspective camera will be used. Selecting a camera in the Maya Render Globals will end up setting the 'renderable' attribute for that camera. If you would really like to have MayaMan support multiple simultaneous camera rendering, please email support@al.com.au

Q: The MayaMan plugin is not auto loading
Under IRIX and Linux, Maya's auto-loading of plugins only seems to work when the plugin is mentioned in both the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH and either the LD_LIBRARYN32_PATH (Irix) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (Linux) environment variables.

This should not be a problem when running Maya in Windows.

Q: I'm using PRMan 10 and the tiff files it creates can't be loaded with fcheck.
PRMan 10 writes tiff files (through the file or tiff display driver) that can't be read by many common image tools... for example, fcheck... to correct this problem add the following line into the rendermn.ini file (which is in the etc folder of your PRMan install):

         /display/tiff/compression       lzw

Q: I don't want to use MayaMan any longer, but the license has expired so the MayaMan license checking stops me from opening scenes in which I've used MayaMan
Removing the path to the MayaMan plugin from the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH environment variable will prevent Maya from finding MayaMan, this way preventing MayaMan to perform it's license checking.
Withouth access to the MayaMan plugin, Maya will no longer recognize the MayaMan specific information in the scene and will issue warnings related to this. You can get rid of these warnings by removing all MayaMan specific information from the scene. This can easily be done by searching for and deleting all nodes starting with MayaMan* in the Maya Outliner.

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