Shading is messed up in viewports
 

I have a friend who is running Maya 2009 on a Mac.

1. He creates a poly plane and scales it. (in wireframe his manipulator handles are all yellow, in shaded mode, they are all grey).
2. He then creates a poly cube.
3. He assigns a lambert to the cube and changes the color to green. The color swatch shows green but the cube in the viewport stays grey.
4. He then assigns lambert to the poly plane and changes the color..as he changes the color, the plane color updates in the view but so does the cube..they are both the same color. He decides to make the plane red. So in view panel, both plane and cube are red...even though cube is assigned a green lambert.
5. He then renders..in the render, the plane is red and the cube is green.

Is this a problem with his graphics card perhaps? He's tried deleting prefs folder. He's also restared his computer. He's had maya for about 2 weeks I think and has had this problem since day 1.

Funny glitches like that tend to be graphics related.

He may be best looking on autodesks qulification chart as even though cards on a Mac are "qualified" (Gforces etc) they still suffer glitches that are similar to the same card on a PC, they generally say what the problems are and this may be one.

He might also be best looking on other forums to with the card and the version of maya he has to see if there are any solutions.

It's a know problem and talked about on the Autodesk Discussions forum. Is your friend running Snow Leopard? (10.6)?

@ gster123, As soon as we suspected it might be a graphics card issue, I sent him to autodesks site to check his card and mac os version for use with Maya 2009 but we didn't think about asking on forums with his version card so we'll try that if nothing turns up.

@halfloaf, I'll find out. If so, we'll search to see if there is any resolution for the problem on autodesks disscussion forum.

Thx to both of you

I think 10.6, 10.6.1 had problems. It was all sorted out in either 10.6.2 or 10.6.3, can't remember.

It wasn't actually an AutoDesk issue (for once!), Apple buggered about with the OpenGL implementation and broke things.

I'm on 10.6.4 and it seems to run OK.

J

What type of machine is he using? Tell him to do the following:

1) Apple icon > About This Mac > More Info...
2) Under hardware, click on Graphics/Displays

If it lists the chipset model as anything with Intel in it's name; you will get this issue. I have the same problem on a MacBook with Maya 2010. I am looking into some possible fixes however. I'll let you know if I come across something that works.

Thanks NextDesign, I'll find out. According to the forums he's checked out, he's confident it's a graphics issue. It's annoying to him but not too much since he's not having more serious issues like others are having.

Yeah, he's got intel.