Maya preferences: Hardcore Reset

The preferences in Maya can cause severe headache: sometimes they really get mixed up and some tools aren’t just working the way they should. I experienced this, too: suddenly all the input channels weren’t available any more and instead of browsing through the billions of settings within Maya I just deleted the prefs folder in C:\Documents and Settings\[my username]\Maya\2008\ (2008 stands for Maya 2008, so it may differ to your folder name). Maya then looks for the settings and will not find them thus creating a whole new prefs folder with all required default settings.

I did this because restore to default settings in the preferences window (Window > Settings/Preferences > Restore Default Settings) didn’t fully work in my case – some tools had still some issues I couldn’t change manually. This may be a bit a hardcore way to reset your Maya installation to the default ‘factory’ settings, but it also allows you to set up your very own prefs folder on an USB stick for example and copy/ replace the settings at the workstation you’re working at for the moment.

This is a bit an annoyance in comparison to 3ds Max. I had to delete the prefs folder in Maya quite a lot of times (OK, I’m an inexperienced user until now… so please don’t blame me…) but I could never corrupt the settings of 3ds Max in any way where I can save all my personal settings in the maxstart.max file.

The preferences in Maya can cause severe headache: sometimes they really get mixed up and some tools aren't just working the way they should. I experienced this, too: suddenly all the input channels weren't available any more and instead of browsing through the billions of settings within Maya I just deleted the prefs folder ...