Troubleshoot Viewport 2.0

If you are not able to obtain the expected results in Viewport 2.0, refer to the following for possible solutions and workarounds:
General
• When using the MHWRender::MRenderer::setGeometryDrawDirty() interface to mark a DAG object associated with an MPxDrawOverride object dirty, the optional topologyChanged parameter must be set to true.
• When using HLSL shaders, you may see different color gradients compared to using GLSL shaders. This is due to their different implementation of color interpolation. This may be corrected by increasing the number of subdivisions of the object to which the shader is applied.
• If you hardware render a free image plane with an alpha channel in Viewport 2.0, it blends with the black background. The default gradient background values are not identical for the Viewport 2.0 workspace and for batch rendering, which defaults to black. Therefore, if you need to obtain the identical results from both renders, you must ensure that their background colors match by setting the scene view background to black. Cycle to black in the scene view by using +B.
• If you find that the shadows of your displaced surfaces are disappearing when you manipulate the light, you may workaround this issue by increasing the Displacement Clipping Bias under the dx11shader Attribute Editor.
• If you encounter z-fighting issues where UI elements and objects that are at the back show through the objects that are in front, increase the depth resolution. One easy method is to enlarge the near clip plane on the camera.

• If you notice that the object draws differently in the viewport shortly after actions such as selecting and tumbling, and unselecting and then tumbling, and you have Consolidate World enabled, you may want to disable Consolidate World to workaround the issue.

  For more information, see Consolidate World.

• When accessing Maya through Windows Remote Desktop, Maya automatically switches the Viewport 2.0 Rendering engine to DirectX 11 mode for the remote session.
• Currently, depth of field is a 2d effect and therefore, you may see a flattened effect when it is used in combination with stereoscopic cameras.
• If you are using Maya Hardware 2.0 to render, your render output is clamped to a resolution of 4kx4k for the Windows and Linux platforms and to 2kx2k for the Mac OS X platform. If you have enabled the Multisample Anti-aliasing option, your render output may be clamped to a lower resolution.

• When enabling shadows in your scene, Viewport 2.0 provides a preview of shadows regardless of whether you select Use Ray Trace Shadows or Use Depth Map Shadows for your light. To adjust the look of shadows when visualizing in Viewport 2.0, select Use Depth Map Shadows and adjust its corresponding settings to see the effect in the viewport.
Transparency
• The Depth Peeling and Weighted Average Transparency Algorithms (Renderer > Viewport 2.0 > ) provide better transparency drawing that is independent of the sorting of objects. Models that can benefit from these transparency methods generally have internal faces.

  In addition, the following tips may be helpful:

  • If the grid draws on top of transparent objects (such as objects shaded with the AutodeskUberShader) , you can workaround the issue by using the Depth Peeling or Weighted Average transparency algorithms.
  • Transparent objects that overlap, or that have per face shading assignments, may not draw correctly if the Object Sorting transparency algorithm is used. Use the Depth Peeling algorithm instead.
  • If your image plane Display Mode is set to RGBA, your image plane is set to transparent. If you notice that it is blending with other textures, set the Display Mode to RGB instead.
• If you paint using the Paint Vertex Color Tool, the brush shape fall off may pick up some alpha and part of your geometry may appear transparent. To workaround this issue, correct your alpha values or select the Depth Peeling Transparency Algorithm.
• For scenes with many semi-transparent PaintFX strokes, use the Depth Peeling Transparency Algorithm (Renderer > Viewport 2.0 > ) for best results.
Performance
• Ghosting of joints may cause slowdowns in Viewport 2.0.
• If NURBS do not tessellate correctly or performance is slow, check that the ArubaTessellator.mll plug-in is loaded.
• For the best performance and scalability, switch to Viewport 2.0 without enabling texturing or shading in any of the other workspace modes. You should work with only one workspace panel displayed in Viewport 2.0 and avoid switching between workspace modes.
• Viewport 2.0 does not load file textures when in non-textured mode. Therefore, you may experience slowness when switching to textured mode from either wireframe or non-textured mode for the first time.
• If you experience performance slowdowns when using all of these features simultaneously:

  • Multisample Anti-aliasing Enable
  • Screen-space Ambient Occlusion
  • Floating Point Render Target

  You can try to reduce GPU memory usage by doing as follows:

  • Reduce texture resolution by enabling Clamp Texture Resolution. See Viewport 2.0 options for more information.
  • Disabling shadowing or disabling any of the aforementioned features
  • Run Maya on a graphics card with more GPU memory

  See Working in Viewport 2.0 for more information.

• If your scene contains 3d textures that are not natively supported by Viewport 2.0, you can avoid long baking times for these textures by modifying the Bake Resolution for Unsupported Texture Types in the Hardware Renderer 2.0 Settings window. See Internal texture baking in Viewport 2.0.
Viewport effects
• If you are using Screen-space Ambient Occlusion and the results differ from expectations; for example, faces appear dark, you may need to reverse your surface normals.
• If your motion blur has no effect when an image plane is immediately behind a moving object, you can workaround this issue by setting the MAYA_VP2_OFF_NON_PE_FRAGMENT environment variable to 1. Setting this environment variable allows the image plane to be included in the calculations of all scene post effects, such as SSAO, depth of field and motion blur.
• When TessellationON is selected in the dx11Shader Attribute Editor, the geometry is not used during screen-space ambient occlusion calculations.
Materials and textures
• If GPU texture ram exceeded error messages continuously appear while you are loading a scene with the UV Editor open and with Parallel set as the Material Loading Mode, click ok to close the message box and then deselect all objects in the scene to stop texture loading in the UV Editor.

  You can also avoid exceeding the GPU texture ram by selecting a lower baked texture resolution (from the Image > UV Texture Editor Baking menu in the UV Editor).
Different behavior in Viewport 2.0 as compared to the Legacy Default Viewport
• Ambient color is supported in Viewport 2.0 but not in the default viewport. If the Ambient Color attribute of your material is set, Viewport 2.0 gives you a more accurate representation of your software render than the default viewport.

• In Viewport 2.0, if an object does not have a shader assigned, the object appears shaded in the scene view with a green color. This behavior is different from that of the default viewport, in which the object appears in the scene view as a wireframe. Viewport 2.0 thus alerts you of any missing shader problems.

  If a shading network error occurs, the object appears shaded in the scene view with a red color.

• In Viewport 2.0, the behavior of Color Accum is different from that of the default workspace: you do not need to use the Opacity attribute to see the effect of Color Accum. However, combining the use of both attributes produces a more realistic glowing particle effect. The opacity of each particle is first multiplied by the Opacity value; then overlapping particles are added together. Lowering the Opacity value prevents the particles from appearing overly bright, resulting in a smoother effect.
• particleSamplerInfo node is supported for Sprites. To connect the rgbPP, opacityPP or incandescencePP attributes, connect particleSamplerInfo through the outColor, outTransparency or outIncandescence attributes in the Hypershade.

  When working with the particleSamplerInfo node, for best performance, you should disconnect unnecessary per-particle attributes from the particle sampler and leave only the required per-particle attributes. If a large number of per-particle attributes are required, use DirectX 11 as your rendering engine rather than OpenGL. If you must use OpenGL, you can also use a high-end graphics card to increase the vertex texture co-ordinate count.

• The heads up display Poly Count for Viewport 2.0 does not include paint effect objects.