Maya auto-switching to Z-up wrecks cameras

Coding
1

I’m working in a shop where we have multiple projects - some Z-up, some Y-up. I have an issue with Maya 2011 where any time it touches an asset that’s Z-up (file import or whatever) it automatically switches Maya to be Z-up. It also wrecks the ortho view ports. I set Maya back to Y-up, then have to set each ortho viewport’s orientation again. :sigh:

I have scripts to set the top, front, and side cameras how I like them, but I’d sure love to know how to disable this auto-re-orientation that Maya does. It only does it to Z-up… never auto-switches back to Y-up.

Anybody know how I could disable this behavior?

thanks
Scott

2

if the camera is bugged in the view because of reorienting the scenes up-vector you need to go into the viewports view menu and press “look at selection”.

3

Well, the funny thing is that the Look At Selection command doesn’t really work well after this thing happens. My viewports get a bit more messed up than that, in that the pivot for the Perspective cam gets strangely offset. Sometimes the Look At Selected command will just send my Persp camera off into orbit somewhere.

So I wrote a script to change the prefs back to Y-up and orient the viewport cams correctly, then also do a “center Pivot” and freeze the transforms for the Perspective cam. That fixes the cams and gets me running again, but I want to stop Maya from doing this in the first place.

Even after fixing this and saving the scene, if I again load the scene, it appears in the viewport for an instant and then the cameras get jacked again.

I think I remember that there’s some script that Maya runs immediately after loading a file, but I’m having trouble finding that. There must be something strange in that script. Can anyone point me to the location of that script?

Thanks
Scott

4

fyi if it helps, the upness of Maya is stored in an optionvar, in userPrefs.mel

“upAxisDirection” “z”

5

You could try listing all script jobs… maya has dozens by default, so it may be tricky finding the ones that run at startup.

You could scour the Maya file itself for “scriptNodes”. Maybe someone embedded some MEL code into the file to run when it’s opened?