Need a bit of help with dual monitors
 

I'm lucky enough to have two LCD's at home, but I'm having some trouble getting maya to work nicley with them.

The image I have attached shows a print screen of my desktop at the point that monitor 1 (m1) moves into monitor 2(m2)

The numbers represent the monitors and the thin red box in the middle shows where m1 and m2 touch. The yellow lines show the mouse location that didnt show up to well due to the 'Prt Scr' I did.

I would really like to use maya so that the main window is on m1 and other tools I open (hypershade, script editor, outliner etc) are sitting in m2. That way I can keep them separate but still have all the extra tools open but not using up any modeling space.

As you can see the problem occurs when I try to right click anything (in this example to assign a lambert to a polyclinder). The second I right click, the options all appear on m1 - which bugs the hell out of me :mad:

Is there any way to get these option boxes to show up on m2? I know its only a small little annoyance, but maya in general works so well on dual monitors, it really suprises me these kinds of bugs occur.

Can anyone help?

Cheers
Azi

also, my copy of The Game Artist's Guide To Maya turned up this morning. Really good read, really looking forward to getting stuck into it - many congrats to Mike!

Yeah Ive gotten that too on my dual setup as well. The reason it happens is because Maya dosnt like dual monitors.

well, thats a shame :(

Seems strange because of all the menus you can disconnect and have floating around the place, it would make great sense to have them work on the second monitor. Keep everything nice and tidy.

May be the video card...

Qualified cards for Maya 6:
http://www.aliaswavefront.com/eng/su...win.html#cards

For Maya 5:
http://www.aliaswavefront.com/eng/su...ya_50_win.html

Lists known problems and solutions... if available.

I actually find it laughable that a major graphics package like Maya has such crappy dual monitor support. This can't be a new concept for them.

I just checked and my graphics card the Fire gl t2 128 is supported. I went to ATI last night and they just released a new drive package for it. I was having problems with my dragging outline not showing up as well as my slider indicater not showing up which was a real pain. The new drivers fixed those issues but it would be nice to assign shaders in the right monitor as well as right click the connections.

One thing I noticed though is that some right clicking does work. I'm not at home right now but I think it's when I right click on an attribute in the attribute window to set a key, it will work. Sigh.....

Maya can not use OpenGL on the 2nd monitor using Dual View.
Use Horizontal-Span mode if your not allready?

I am not sure what you mean by horizontal span mode.

should be in nview settings or depending which monitor you have, you have to disable the second monitor first by going display properties and right clicking on the second monitor and unclicking attached. then you should be able to change it to horizontal span mode and set that as your monitor, it basically treats both monitors as one output rather than two seperate linked ones.

Thanks for the tip i will try it out!

Spanning the two screens works really well with Maya, thanks for the info LauriePriest. Splits the work area and option boxes nicley.

One thing I should note, is that with two screens being spanned practically all other programs look very weird and pretty unusable

When maximised they stretch across the whole screen watching videos or browsing websites becomes a right hassle! :confused:

But setting up shortcuts to change views back and forth, depending on the work needed to be done should, makes it pretty neat :)

Man, I muast be losing brain cells as I can't find the span settings. Is it on the monitor's menus itself or is this part of Windows? Or part of my video card settings.

I am using windows XP, Fire gl T2 128 video card.

Could some one please explain step by step what to do and include making the shortcut to normal view mode? I would really appreciate it.


I tried just stretching the window over to the second monitor while i was in dual monitor mode, and it wouldn't stretch over very far.


Thanks

I also have an ATI card but its a 9800. I'm not sure how much of this will apply, but here it is anyway.

The span settings do not appear if you only have the drivers installed. You may need to download and install the "ATI Catalyst Control Center" which gives you a ton more options to mess around with.

For me (once I installed and ran the app) I went to [Standard View] tab, then [Display Manager] and selected [Wizard]. Following the directions on screen (a few [Next>] buttons) I came to an option allowing "Extended Desktop", "Clone", and "Horizontal Stretch" modes, with the latter being the one I picked.

Having messed with it for just a few minutes I still havent managed to get some custom shortcuts to display settings working correctly (e.g one version with a horizontal span, another with normal extended view) but I'm working on it.

If anyone has a neat way of doing so it would be cool to hear...