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.

Performance

Problem Possible Solution(s)

The viewport stopped working or has become unresponsive.

Tip: You can display the progress of material and texture loading by turning on Material Loading Details in the Heads Up Display (HUD) options.
  • Ensure that you have the correct graphics configuration and graphics driver version. If your graphics driver is out of date, you should visit Maya Certified Hardware on the Autodesk Knowledge Network for more information.

    See also Manage GPU memory for Viewport 2.0 for more information.

  • Disable Parallel Evaluation mode. To do this, in the Animation (Settings) preferences, set Evaluation mode to DG.
  • Set Material Loading mode to Deferred.

    To do this: In the Preferences window (Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences), select the Display category. Under Performance, set Material Loading Mode to Deferred.

  • Pause Viewport 2.0 by clicking the pause icon: in the Status Line. This allows you to make changes in your scene with having to wait for the viewport to update. This is especially useful when working with complex scenes.
    Tip: To reduce the loading time of complex scenes, enable the Pause Viewport 2.0 (startup) option in the Display category of the Preference window.

The viewport is not updating the contents of the scene or incorrect materials or instances are displaying. For example, textures, geometry, or cached animations do not appear.

  • Force Viewport 2.0 to reset the scene. To do this, in the MEL command line type: ogs-reset;
  • Disable Consolidate World under Performance in the Viewport 2.0 Options window.
  • Disable GPU Instancing under Performance in the Viewport 2.0 Options window. This option is off by default.

Your GPU RAM usage has exceeded or is very close to the GPU RAM limit of your video card. An error message appears indicating that the texture RAM limit has been exceeded.

  • Turn off other Viewport 2.0 effects that use GPU RAM.

    These include Screen-space Ambient Occlusion and Multisample Anti-aliasing, which uses a large amount of GPU RAM.

  • Disable Floating Point Render Target in the Viewport 2.0 Options.
  • Enable Clamp Texture Resolution so that textures are downscaled and use less GPU RAM.

    To do this, In the Viewport 2.0 Options, under Maximum Texture Resolution Clamping, turn on Clamp Texture Resolution and set Max Texture Resolution to Automatic. The viewport will automatically lower all texture resolutions to improve performance.

    Alternatively, set Max Texture Resolution to Custom and set the value to a number that is lower than your average texture resolution. Using 1024 is often a good compromise between quality and memory usage.

    See also Manage GPU memory for Viewport 2.0 for more information.

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.

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).

Shading and lighting

Problem Possible Solution(s)

Materials on my polygon objects display only black in the viewport.

This may also happen when using Screen-space Ambient Occlusion.

The faces of the polygon objects have reversed normals. Change the facing direction of the normals. See Reverse polygon normals.

If you cannot reverse the normals you can also do one of the following:
  • Make your object double-sided. To do this, in the polygonShape node attributes, in the Render Stats section, turn in on Double Sided.
  • Turn on Two Sided Lighting in the Lighting Panel menu.

Textures appear increasingly blurry as I add more objects / references to the scene.

This is a sign that Maximum Texture Resolution Clamping is enabled and working to keep you from exceeding the available GPU memory. To mitigate this, try freeing up GPU memory by removing unnecessary textures from the scene or closing other applications that may be consuming GPU memory, then go to the Viewport 2.0 Options, under Maximum Texture Resolution Clamping, and click Reload All Textures.

Not all lights in the scene display.

Increase the Light Limit in the Viewport 2.0 Options window, under Performance. The default is 8 lights and the maximum is 16.

Aliasing or flashing artifacts appear in the scene view.

Increase the camera's Near Clip Plane value. To do this, select that camera and in the Camera Attributes, increase the Near Clip Plane value.

Bump maps and displacement maps display incorrectly.

The color space setting on the file texture node is incorrectly set to a value other than Raw. See Specify the color space for textures and other image inputs.

Tip: Any textures that do not contain visible colour data should be set to raw.

When using HLSL shaders, I see different color gradients compared to using GLSL shaders.

This is due to their different implementation of color interpolation. To correct this, increase the number of subdivisions of the object to which the shader is applied.

When using DX11 shaders, shadows on displaced surfaces are disappearing when you manipulate the light.

Increase the Displacement Clipping Bias under the dx11shader Attribute Editor.

Hardware rendering a free image plane with an alpha channel 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.

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.

When painting using the Paint Vertex Color Tool, some areas of the geometry incorrectly appear transparent.

The brush shape fall off is picking up some alpha. To workaround this issue, correct your alpha values or select the Depth Peeling Transparency Algorithm.

Transparent image planes with Display Mode set to RGBA blend with other textures.

Set the image plane's Display Mode to RGB instead.

Transparent objects that overlap, or that have per face shading assignments, are not drawing correctly.

Make sure that Transparency Algorithm is set to Alpha Cut or Depth Peeling (see Viewport 2.0 Options).

The grid draws on top of transparent objects (such as objects shaded with the AutodeskUberShader).

Make sure that Transparency Algorithm is set to Alpha Cut or Depth Peeling (see Viewport 2.0 Options).

General

Problem Possible Solution(s)

Third-party plug-in objects do not appear in viewport.

Switch the rendering engine to OpenGL- Legacy mode.

To do this: In the Preferences window (Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences), select the Display category. Under Viewport 2.0, set Rendering engine to OpenCL- Legacy.

Frame rate indicator(HUD) displays low fps values for static frames.

This is expected. Viewport 2.0 framerate display is based on the last interaction or playback event. This value displays for a static frame until the next playback such as a tumble, pan or time slider playback.

I am encounter z-fighting issues where UI elements and objects that are at the back show through the objects that are in front.

Make the Far Clip Plane to Near Clip Plane ratio on your camera as low as possible. This means increasing Near Clip Plane, or decreasing Far Clip Plane, or doing both.

Increasing Far Clip Plane allows you to see more objects behind the previous Far Clip Plane distance, but leads to more visible z-fighting artifact.

I imported my scene from another content creation application and the sizes of objects appear incorrectly. Or, I see jiggling geometry defects over time.

  • Your imported objects are too far from the origin of the scene.
    • Reduce the scale of the imported objects.
    • Adjust the Near Clip Plane and Far Clip Plane values as described in the troubleshooting solution above.
  • Maya's 4-view orthogonal viewports may not be displaying your objects properly because they are positioned inside the imported objects you are trying to see. Move the cameras away from the origin.

Viewport 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.

Objects draw differently in the viewport shortly after actions such as selecting and tumbling, and unselecting and then tumbling.

Disable Consolidate World in the Viewport 2.0 Options.

On macOS and when using a secondary monitor with high-DPI scaling, the view in the viewport appears offset and the ViewCube does not display.

Drag the Maya session to the primary monitor and back again to initiate a refresh.

You are unable to use Viewport 2.0 for reasons not listed in this Troubleshooting section. Or, you use third party plug-ins or custom development that does not work in Viewport 2.0.

Enable the legacy viewport using the MAYA_ENABLE_DEPRECATED_VIEWPORT environment variable. See Rendering variables.

Note:
  • The MAYA_ENABLE_DEPRECATED_VIEWPORT variable will be removed in future versions (2024+) of Maya.
  • Enabling the legacy viewport increases Viewport 2.0 memory usage for scenes with smoothed openSubdiv meshes. To maintain Viewport 2.0 performance, disable the legacy viewport when it's not used by turning off the environment variable.

Related topics

Parent topic: Working in Viewport 2.0