General variables

If you have multiple license files in your FlexLM directory you can set this environment variable to uniquely define your Maya license file and speed up the Maya start time.

For example, set:

MAYA_ALT_EN = <
 pathToLicenseFile
>\Flexlm\maya.lic 
                        

where <pathToLicenseFile> is the path to your license file location.

When Maya encounters a fatal error, this variable writes a crash report file (MayaCrashLog[yymmdd.hhmm].log) to the directory specified with the TMP environment variable. This file contains a detailed description of what Maya was doing when the failure occurred.

To enable this option, set the value equal to 1. To disable it, set the value to 0 (zero) or leave it undefined.

Disables the functionality of the Backspace key. To enable this option, set the value equal to 1. To disable it, set the value to 0 (zero) or leave it undefined.

By default, if you reference a file multiple times, Maya only reads the file from disk the first time it is referenced. When processing subsequent references to that file, Maya copies the existing scene information from the initial read, rather than re-reading the file from disk. File referencing is done this way to optimize performance. Occasionally, this multiple reference optimization feature causes errors.

Setting the MAYA_FORCE_REF_READ environment variable turns off the file referencing optimization feature and forces all reference files to be explicitly read from disk. This can fix Maya's behavior in some situations that would otherwise be evaluated incorrectly, but may also slow down performance.

Set this environment variable to 1 to enable parallel memory copy. In some cases, parallel memory copy is faster on Opteron and Nehalem based systems. However, it may also be slower on Xeon systems, in which case you may want to disable parallel memory.

Use this environment variable to set your IP version, for example, ipv4.

This variable is used to override where help files are found. Maya pre-appends this value to its help paths to create a string which is passed to the browser.

You can use this to point Maya to a central help server, or set it to a http: URL to have Maya get its help files from a web site instead of the Maya help on your hard drive.

Incorrect use of this flag will prevent Maya Help from working within Maya.

If this environment variable is set, Maya won’t load the file initialLayout.mel, which creates the interface. You must specify an alternate file to run (for example, MAYA_OVERRIDE_UI = test.mel). This variable should only be specified if you want to completely replace Maya’s UI for your own, custom-programmed interface.

Paint Effects uses the multiple processors on your machine when painting and rendering. You can set this variable to control the number of processors used by Maya. The minimum is one (1) and the maximum is three (3).

Allows you to override the Expression Editor and use your own editor. The editor must be set to run in the foreground.

Allows you to override the language setting of the current operating system. This is most useful when you want to run Maya in English on a Japanese or Chinese (Windows) operating system; otherwise, Maya picks up the language of the operating system and always runs in Japanese/Chinese.

Set the value of this environment variable to en_US (for English) or ja_JP (for Japanese) or zh_CN (for Simplified Chinese).

This environment variable is disabled if it is not set. Set it to any string to enable it. It is disabled by default.

In Maya 2011 and below, no explicit test existed to ensure that attribute names were unique within a node. This could lead to ambiguity with commands such as setAttr NODE.DUPLICATED_ATTR 3.0. Some existing scripts, files, and/or plugins may rely on this ambiguous behavior; therefore, for backwards compatibility, this environment variable was introduced in Maya 2012. However, you are encouraged to discontinue this ambiguous behavior.

If you encounter problems with Maya stopping unexpectedly while loading a large scene, try setting this environment variable to 1. However, when this environment variable is set, Maya does not release the memory used when you select File > New; it only does when you quit Maya.

This environment variable specifies how much GPU memory (MB) the gpuCache.mll plug-in uses for vertex buffer objects when a GPU cache file is imported and played back. This value overrides the plug-in's default memory use for vertex buffer object, which assumes that most of the graphics card memory is available to the plug-in.

In some case, you may want to lower the amount of memory available to the plug-in so memory is available for other processes such as Viewport 2.0. The table provides the gpuCache plug-in default memory allocations.

If you want to display large component ID numbers (>16777216) in Viewport 2.0, you must use a graphics card that supports integer varying input to geometry shaders; and in addition, set this environment variable to 1.