Viewport 2.0 features and limitations

Requirements

See http://www.autodesk.com/hardware for the certification chart for Maya for Viewport 2.0.

In order to run Viewport 2.0, you must have the correct graphics configuration and graphics driver version. If your graphics driver is out of date, you should visit http://www.autodesk.com/hardware to download and update your driver.

For scenes with large amounts of textures, geometry, or cached animation, it is important to take note of the amount of available GPU RAM on your video card.

If your GPU RAM usage is very close to the GPU RAM limit of your video card, your textures may not load, and your scene appears in shaded mode. An error message appears indicating that the texture RAM limit has been exceeded, and suggesting that you reduce the Max Texture Resolution clamp. See Maximum Texture Resolution Clamping for more information.

To check the GPU memory usage of your card (in MB), use the command ogs -gpu.

To check the GPU RAM limit of your card, refer to the Output Window of Maya.

The following are some guidelines for reducing the amount of memory usage:

• hiding objects
• unloading references
• changing objects to bounding box mode
• decreasing the far-clip distance of the camera so that less geometry is visible in the viewport
• enabling shadows impacts GPU memory usage as well as performance. The cost is dependant on the shadow resolution and the number of lights for which shadowing is enabled.
• When using gpuCache, more GPU memory is required when both the Legacy Default Viewport and Viewport 2.0 are used simultaneously.

Running multiple Maya sessions; or, running Maya simultaneously with another 3d program, requires extra GPU memory. If Maya is running alongside another 3d application, it does not automatically detect that it needs to share memory with that other application, and therefore may inadvertently exceed the GPU memory limit.

You can set the MAYA_OGS_GPU_MEMORY_LIMIT environment variable to override the memory detection in Viewport 2.0 and manually set a lower memory limit to reserve GPU memory for an alternate 3d application. Set MAYA_OGS_GPU_MEMORY_LIMIT to the memory limit in MB. For example, to limit Viewport 2.0 on a 2GB card to use only 1GB, set this environment variable to 1024. The output window confirms that the memory limit has been artificially set.

This may improve performance in the instances where you are running a 3d application simultaneously, but it decreases performance otherwise, and therefore should be used with caution.

GPU instancing decreases the amount of GPU memory used (if you have a lot of instances).

For scenes with complex shader networks, for example, complex ShaderFX networks, or heavy use of the DirectX 11 UberShader; or, that involve viewport effects such as screen space ambient occlusion or depth of field, the speed of the graphics card may impact performance.

For large and complex scenes, consider using the GPU cache workflow. See About GPU Caches for more information.

If your scene includes many viewport effects, for example screen-space ambient occlusion, multi-sample anti-aliasing, motion blur and so forth, you may experience visual corruption when you approach the GPU memory limit. To workaround this issue, disable some of your viewport effects; or, run Maya on a graphics card with more GPU memory.

Features

Viewport 2.0 supports all common workflows in Maya, with the exception of the following limitations:

Limitations:

• Cameras
  • Do not map textures to the Zero Parallax Color attribute
  • multi-sample anti-aliasing currently not supported for stereo display modes
• manipulators
  • stippling (in the solid area of the manipulator that is being rendered inside an object)
• Selection Highlighting
  • cone shape created from Create > Volume Primitive > Cone
  • deformers:
    • axis of the lattice deformer
    • numbers on the position marker and orientation marker
    • all non-linear deformers
  • annotations
  • Create > Measure Tools
    Note: Selection Highlighting is supported for the locator created by the Distance Tool
• polygon sorting
• ViewCube
• backface culling
  • Display > Polygons > Culling Options > Keep Hard Edges
  • Under the shape node Attribute Editor, Mesh Component Display
    • Display Tangent
• Shaders

  These shaders are supported as baked:

  • Brownian
  • Cloud
  • Crater
  • Granite
  • Leather
  • Water
  • Wood
  • 3D procedural bump mapping

  Limitations:

  • The shaders are not supported:
    • Displacement
    • Light Fog
    • Particle Cloud
    • Surface Info
    • Surf. Luminance
  • Ramp Shader Limitations:
    • Normalized Brightness Color Input mode not supported for Color ramp
    • Forward Scatter not supported
    • mapped ramps not supported
  • Hardware Texturing overrides per shader are not supported
  • Conversion of .HDR linear image to display color space is not supported through exposure controls
  • particleSamplerInfo node only supported for Sprites
• Lighting
  • shadows are not supported for point lights
  • Ambient lights in Viewport 2.0 do not respect the Ambient Shade attribute
  • The Instance leaf nodes option in the Edit > Duplicate Special options is not supported for light instances.
• ghosting
  • Custom Key Steps
  • ghosting of deforming geometry not supported
  • fading of ghost color not supported. This feature is deprecated.
• joint xray draw mode
  • X-ray joint mode does not work when any of Motion Blur, depth of field, or Screen-space Ambient Occlusion are enabled. See Viewport 2.0 options for more information.
• Paint Effects
  • statistics on heads up display for polygon count is not supported
• nHair
  • area light illumination is not supported for nHair
• Toon
  • ramp textures are not supported on the Toon shader