General variables

Restores the previous licensing behavior of trying to recover a lost license for 15 minutes rather than the default Autodesk standard of two hours.

Occasionally, shots created in the scene would connect to the Camera Sequencer node in a referenced file. This behaviour has since been corrected. Use this option to restore previous behaviour.

To enable this option, set the value equal to 1. To disable it, leave it undefined.

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.

Ordinarily when a SIGTERM signal is sent to Maya's signal handler, it will attempt to save the scene and generate a crash report. Setting this variable to a value of 1 causes Maya to quite instantly without performing those steps.

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, tangent calculation is multi-threaded. However, this introduces a small amount of variability in the result. Enabling this variable removes the variability to guarantee a deterministic tangent value, but at the cost of slower performance.

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

Set this environment variable to 1 to opt-out of analytics when starting Maya in batch mode.

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.

This variable addresses performance issues with scenes that contain many LOD Groups, as they trigger graph repartitioning whenever a camera is moved.

This variable disables packing of attribute data for Multi-Multi attributes into blocks. When packing is enabled, file sizes are smaller and load/save times faster for certain types of data. For example, skin weights which have an attribute structure like skinCluster.weightList[].weights[], storing weights per-vertex, per-influence.

The packed blocks combine setAttr commands to set values for a range in the parent multi, for example, setAttr skinCluster.weightList[0:122].weights 4 1 2 3 4 4 5 6 7 8 4 8 9 10 11, which significantly reduce the number of setAttr commands needed for this type of data in the file.

Previously, this created a setAttr command in the mayaAscii or mayaBinary file for each element in weightList that would set weights for a single vertex. These commands would have a small number of influences/values, for example: setAttr skinCluster.weightList[123].weights 1 2 3 4.

However, this produced a large number of setAttr commands for a large number of vertices. This applies to any attributes in a scene that have this multi-multi structure, not just skinCluster weights.

This variable is applied every time a file is saved, so the behavior can be changed dynamically without restarting Maya.

Set the following values:

1 – disable packing of the attribute data

empty – re-enable the variable (You can also delete the variable from the environment)

For example:

import os

del os.environ["MAYA_DISABLE_PACKED_MULTI_ATTRIBUTES"]

# or

os.environ["MAYA_DISABLE_PACKED_MULTI_ATTRIBUTES"] = ""

Increases viewport performance by combining traditional consolidation for static objects and MultiDraw consolidation for non-deforming animated objects (including meshes, NURBS surfaces, NURBS curves, and other geometry) when drawing in the viewport.

This environment variable is enabled by default (MAYA_ENABLE_MULTI_DRAW_CONSOLIDATION=2).

Set other values as follows:

0 - only traditional static object consolidation

1 - MultiDraw consolidation for static objects and animated objects

Due to missing graphics stack support on Mac OS X, MultiDraw Consolidation is not available

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.

Lets you bypass the Application Home screen and directly enter the Maya User Interface. This Environment Variable is the same as the Show Home Screen on startup option in the Interface Preferences.

This environment variable is disabled by default (MAYA_NO_HOME=0).

Set other values as follows:

1 - Skips the Application Home screen when starting Maya and launches directly into the workspace.

Lets you hide the Home icon that appears next to the menu bar. This is useful to prevent accidental switching to the Application Home screen. This Environment Variable is the same as the Show Home icon in menu bar option in the Interface Preferences.

This environment variable is disabled by default (MAYA_NO_HOME_ICON=0).

Set other values as follows:

1 - Hides the Home icon and repositions menus to their default location.

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 (English) or ja_JP (Japanese) or zh_CN (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.

This error is caused by a limitation with AMD Ryzen processors that was addressed in Maya v.2022.

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.

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.

Set this environment variable to any value to turn off license cascading for Maya.

Use this environment variable to determine whether your scene file name is included with your CER report to Autodesk. If this variable is not set, the scene name is shown as undisclosed.

• 0 = scene name is listed as undisclosed
• 1 = include only the file name
• 2 = include the full path/file name

Set this environment variable to 0 so that when you have a Maya or Qt window over another window with a model panel (or a window such as the Outliner, Graph Editor, or any panel under Panels > Panel), hitting the Shift key does not cause the model panel's window to steal focus.

The default value of this variable is 1.

When this environment variable is set to 0, clicking a hotkey only affects the workspace that has focus. If you want to use the hotkey with a different workspace, you may need to click on the workspace to bring focus to that area before your hotkey takes effect.

In Maya 2013, the Node Editor displays statistics (Nodes, Connections, Edges, Swatch Proxies, FPS, Scale) by default. Currently, the statistics are not displayed by default and you can view them by setting the environment variable MAYA_ENABLE_NG_CONSOLE_STATS to 1.

Set this variable to 1 to lock the Maya command window to the foreground of your display.

This is useful when running Maya API standalone applications, which can steal the cursor focus from the Maya command window and make it difficult to exit the running applications.

By default, if you load a plug-in that causes any change to the scene, a warning appears as follows: 'Loading plug-in Plug-inName has resulted in changes to the scene that may need to be saved.'

To disable this warning, set MAYA_DISABLE_PLUGIN_SCENE_MODIFIED_WARNING to 1.

Previously, Maya accepted illegal names while creating and renaming nodes; for example, ns:0abc. As of Maya 2015, illegal node names are no longer valid. Each time you open, reference, or import a scene with illegal node names, a dialog appears informing you to update your scene and correct the illegal node names.

To disable the dialog for the current session of Maya, enable the checkbox. To disable the dialog permanently, set this environment variable to 1.

To list all nodes with illegal names, execute the command listNodesWithIncorrectNames.

For more information, see Troubleshoot illegal node names.

Set this variable 1 to skip checking STDIN mode on exit. Maya will exit without waiting for STDIN to return to BLOCKING state.

Set this variable to load user site-directory Python libraries before Maya's own Python libraries on startup.

When this variable is not set, Maya's Pythons libraries will be loaded before any user site-directory Python libraries.

Loading external Python libraries before Maya's own libraries can lead to unexpected behaviour, including Maya crashing on startup.

When set to '1', Maya attempts to write out version 1 .hikc character definition files when exporting a character definition from the HumanIK menu. This will fail if additional joints introduced in version 2 of the .hikc format are present in the character. This variable is useful if character definition files need to be compatible with the legacy HumanIK Gameware product.

You can obtain crash error reports from Maya by doing as follows:

1. Write your own custom executable that handles this data (for example, you may want to write the CER data to a file or send it via email to a list of users).
2. Set the MAYA_USER_CER_APP environment variable to the path of your own custom executable.

Maya will provide the necessary command line arguments to call your custom executable when a crash occurs, just as it does with the its own "native" senddmp executable.

You can find the senddmp.exe in the \bin directory of your Maya installation.

MAYA_USER_CER_APP=python.exe A:\path\to\custom_cer_handler.py

This functionality is only available on Windows.

When set to '1', Maya will bypass displaying all security related dialogs (but still log security incidents in the .log file).