Why Does Freeze Transforms Work Differently on Cameras vs. Geometry in Maya?

Tools
1

I’ve encountered confusing behavior with Maya’s Freeze Transforms function and I’m hoping someone can clarify how it works with cameras versus regular objects.

Here’s what I’m observing:

  1. With a default cube: If I move, rotate, and scale it, then run Modify > Freeze Transforms, the Channel Box values for Translate and Rotate reset to 0 and Scale resets to 1. The cube stays in place, and its current state is now treated as the new zero.

  2. With a user-created camera: If I do the exact same thing—transform it and then run Freeze Transforms—the Channel Box values do not reset to zero. They retain the values from before the freeze.

This leads to two big questions:

  • Why doesn’t the Freeze Transforms command apply to user-created cameras in the same way it does to geometry?

  • Furthermore, if I do run Freeze on a camera, then move it somewhere else, using Modify > Reset Transforms does not return the camera to the position it was in when I froze it.

This seems inconsistent. What is the underlying logic here. I know maya has numerous ways to set camera postions (the camera bookmark system, mel, et al.) but am really wondering why a cameras transform is not treated like all transforms

Thanks in advance for any insights!

2

freeze transform is not something that just resets the transform;
it stores the current worldspace coordinates of components →
resets the transform →
loads the worldspace coordinates of the components.

i guess in this case the camera is excluded as the camera does not have any components and is most likely not using any of the known types (MPxGeometryNode or MPxLocatorNode) for its shape. it probably errors out silently on trying to get the worldspace coordinates on the shape and just does not continue from there. if you freeze a locator for instance it does reset the transform to its default values (except for the pivot) but the shape does not remain in its rotated state as these values are not stored on the shape and also goes back to its original rotation (in this case there is something that breaks internally as getting its transform might not always result in the right coordinates)

the question is, why do you want to freeze the transforms on a camera?
what benefit would you get out of it?

1 Like
3

I think i was just trying to determine the differences between polygon objects and camera objects, as up till then i was operating under naive assumptions. I did not at all apprciate object components and their worldspace positions.

Thank you for this answer, it explains a lot.