Maya - Destroying most/all fatal errors?

Andr

Hey again dear community !

I return once more to ask if any of you know the answer to something which has been bothering me for quite some time now:

Maya crashes a few times per day when I perform combine/add divisions on certain objects. This happens to all kinds of meshes which I work with each and every day.

I usually start out clean with a box and extrude my way to my desired shape, and sometimes the 'combine with cube' trick works to relieve me of fatal errors...

However I was wondering if there is a 'master fatal error destroyer' method which I could use to avoid these all-together (or to bypass them if they occur). Sometimes the cube method doesn't work, and then I have to do all kinds of crazy things (like mirror geometry and scale in negative value, freeze etc. and then it's gone), I don't want to do that.

Does anyone know a good way to bypass this nuisance?

I'm using Maya 2012 x64.

(By the way, my extrude polygons hotkey stopped working too, don't know what's up with that, so if anyone has a solution to that problem then I'd be a happy man!)

- Andr

lysaara

How often are you deleting the History on your mesh? (Edit > Delete By type > History) I find the larger my History gets, the less stable Maya becomes, so I like to delete the History and freeze unnecessary transforms fairly often.

Andr

lysaara wrote: »

How often are you deleting the History on your mesh? (Edit > Delete By type > History) I find the larger my History gets, the less stable Maya becomes, so I like to delete the History and freeze unnecessary transforms fairly often.

Every few minutes. I suspected someone might assume this may be the issue (since it is plausible) but I delete history every few seconds.. have it hotkeyed :P

(I do the same thing as you do)

Krio

Don't use Maya:D

o2_is_alright

Does it only happen when you use specific tools? (The interactive split tool for instance is VERY unstable in 2012 so I always use the old one). You could try look for scripts with similar functions as those tools, they are often better and more versatile than Mayas built in tools. Not sure it would make a difference though but might be worth a try?
Also, I use Maya 2012 too and whenever I get fatal errors (doesn't happen that often) it's usually due to dirty geometry or that I'm trying to do something the wrong way.

throttlekitty

There's a few scripts out there that will rebuild a mesh from scratch to avoid these issues. It's been so long since I've needed one, I'm never sure if it's my workflow or the software getting better. Hypergraph with Heirarchy view is helpful in troubleshooting a mesh, sometimes you'll still have crazy inputs left over after clearing history that aren't visible in the channel box.

2012 broke something with hotkeys, in that you can't override certain keys, or it only works for one session. Try commenting out the key you're overriding in [MayaInstallPath]\scripts\startup\hotkeySetup.mel

o2, I never had issues with the split tool, gonna have to take a look now.

o2_is_alright

o2, I never had issues with the split tool, gonna have to take a look now.

That's great that you never had any problem with that, I wish it worked better for me as well. There was a thread about it here on polycount: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=91150&highlight=interactive+split+tool+maya+2012

And good tip about the Hypergraph, I don't have the habit of using it, but maybe I should^^

Andr

throttlekitty wrote: »

There's a few scripts out there that will rebuild a mesh from scratch to avoid these issues. It's been so long since I've needed one, I'm never sure if it's my workflow or the software getting better. Hypergraph with Heirarchy view is helpful in troubleshooting a mesh, sometimes you'll still have crazy inputs left over after clearing history that aren't visible in the channel box.

2012 broke something with hotkeys, in that you can't override certain keys, or it only works for one session. Try commenting out the key you're overriding in [MayaInstallPath]\scripts\startup\hotkeySetup.mel

o2, I never had issues with the split tool, gonna have to take a look now.

Interesting note on the hidden history.. I'll have to look into that . Thanks for the tip!

throttlekitty

o2_is_alright wrote: »

That's great that you never had any problem with that, I wish it worked better for me as well. There was a thread about it here on polycount: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=91150&highlight=interactive+split+tool+maya+2012

And good tip about the Hypergraph, I don't have the habit of using it, but maybe I should^^

Oh, I've been using the regular split tool all this time, I had forgotten about the 'interactive' one. I crashed it pretty quick, woo! Doesn't seem all that useful, honestly, I've never been a fan of hitting enter to finish edits.

I prefer hypergraph over outliner, and use alt-d (normal) and alt-D (with hierarchy)