How to Fix a Broken Perspective Camera in Maya

 This is an issue I came across while at FIEA.  As someone who lives in maya, it can get very difficult to work when your perspective camera isn't working as expected.  It's especially difficult when you literally can't find anything in your scene.  You could add another perspective camera, but that can make your scene confusing if other team members have to use your maya scene.  I have found that this problem seems to occur more when the scale in the maya scene is bigger.  There's a couple ways to fix this problem depending on the situation but here are three solutions I have found.

• The first way you could fix this problem is to try and reset your preferences.  This does not always work but in some situations it will solve the problem.  If this does not work it's going to be a scene issue.  

• If the first solution did not work, in your maya scene itself check to make sure that everything is not hidden.  Sometimes when you're working you accidentally hide all of the work in your scene.  This step is more to make sure that everything is visible in your scene.  You can check by looking in the outliner and checking in the show tab. If everything is checked in show and the texted isn't greyed out in the outliner then everything is visible in your scene.  

Maya 2022 Outliner

Maya 2022 Show

Maya 2022 Show Settings

• If resetting preferences and everything is visible in your scene, then your perspective camera itself is lost in space. This is an easy fix.  In your outliner, select your perspective camera just like you would for any asset you select.  Go into it's channel box and look at the translations and rotations.  If they are crazy wild numbers you need to zero them out.  Then also in the channel box go under the Shapes section and and find the Center of Interest tab.  Once you find it, change the number because more than likely when you are scrolling it's based on the Center of Interest.  

Maya 2022 Perspective Camera Channel Box

A Solution to Maya's Performance Lag and Freezing

 This is a problem I have come across both in at my time at FIEA and in work life.  Sometimes when using Maya it can lag behind or freeze.  This happens especially when trying to first open Maya, opening export settings, switching between different interface modes, and trying to save.  There can be many causes for this to be happening, but one solution I have come across is that Maya is using an unsupported UI rendering engine.  What this means is that the machine is not fully supported for the rendering UI engine that is currently being used.  Luckily this is a very easy fix!  

To begin fixing this problem have Maya open and navigate to Windows at the top and scroll down to Settings and Preferences.  On the side bar, select Preferences.

Autodesk Maya 2022 Windows / Settings Preferences /  Preferences

After selecting Preferences, a new window should appear.  Under Categories, select Display.  Scroll down to the very bottom where you will see a section called Viewport 2.0.  Change the Rendering Engine to OpenGL - Legacy.

Maya 2022 Preferences / Display / Rendering Engine = OpenGL - Legacy

Click Save and close Maya.  The next time you open Maya it should be working a lot faster!