Fog rolling in...
 

As I pull out, a fog-like substance rolls over my grid and any object sitting on it. How do I get rid of this?

http://www.timealone.com/webstuff/fogrollingin.jpg

that's the clipping plane... i believe you can change the near and far clipping plane settings in that camera's attribute editor. if it's just perspective, change the persp camera's attributes. not sure at the moment where to find the actual settings, but that's what you're experiencing.

I noticed that this problem occurs when I change my Preferences > Settings > Working Units > Linear ... to foot as opposed to the default centimeter.

If I change Working Units back to centimeter, the problem goes away. Now, if I can just get the scene to behave when I change Linear to foot.

Yes. You're right. I found that by going into the Camera Attribute Editor, in the first panel entitled Camera Attributes there is an attribute called Far Clip Pane. I cranked that up to 150.000 and the fog disappeared.

Thanks for the tip.

party on dude.

I'm not sure if anyone knows why Maya has the clipping plane settings. I was told in a Maya class to make the near and far planes an outrageous number so you don't run into a problem.... like 100,000.

clipping planes are there for a few reasons that I am aware of.
Firstly: Memory use. The more stuff viewable in the scene and the more poly's you cram into it the more memory it consumes and the harder your machine has to work. When theings are out of your viewable area, or out of the clip plane the consume a lot less resources. Where as if your clip plane is set to say 99999999999 far and .0000000000000000001 near you might start having some troubles. Though if there is nothing in the scene, there isn't too much to be worried about.

Another thing is for rendering from a camera view. If you have a 35 mm camera placed into the scene you shouldn't be able to get too close into objects. As in real life you can get so close to an object with a 35mm lens and not get defined detail. So it helps with realism in quite a few ways.

One last thing. The clip plane among other things is a value in maya which can go to far high higs, and very small lows. Values like this are meant to be incrementally increased and decreased to optimize render time and performance.

Cuts down on the number of polys to display, it also cuts down on calcualtions at render time, ray gets to far, dump it, no need to carry on the calculation.