Choosing working units for the current scene

…One of the most vexing problems that new users…to Maya have, is dealing with issues of scale.…If you don't have your object scaled properly in various scenes, then, when you…merge them together into a master scene,…then they could all be at different scales.…And this could be a major issue, if…for example, you've created a character rig not…able to be scaled and then you try…to bring that character into an environment that's…at some other scale then you're going to have major problems.…

So it's best to adopt a scale convention before you begin a project.…Generally speaking, Maya projects are built at scales of…one to one, one tenth, or one one hundredth.…Now, what does that mean?…Well, you need to think of Maya as being a physical world that has an absolute size.…So when you model something, do you want…the model to be the same size as it would be in the real world?…Then it would be 1 to 1, or unity scale.…If you have a scene that's larger than let's say a square mile.…

Then you'll be forced to build a miniature version of that, inside Maya.…