Maya scene optimization and mentalray

Velktri

Hi everyone, I just completed an automotive modeling tutorial in Maya and I have come across a couple of issues. The car is at about 400,000 vert with smooth preview on and 25,000 without. The scene chugs a little bit, but the big issue is that rendering with mental ray causes Maya to crash. I exported the car as an OBJ and rendered it in a new scene and everything went smoothly. So my main questions are:

1. What else is there that I can do to clean up a scene in Maya? I deleted the history and cleared out any empty groups/unused geo in the outliner. That's about as far as my knowledge goes there.

2. Are there any other reason Mental Ray would crash Maya? As soon as I click render, Windows informs me that Maya has stopped working and starts searching for solutions.

3. A little off topic but does any know of some nice smoothing tools to deal with pinching issues for Maya. I thought cleaning it up in Zbrush my be a good idea, but I haven't tested it out yet.

Thanks for any help guys!

4evra

problem could be in your hardware rather than in 3d program.
What are your specs?
Processor?RAM?

I would guess that RAM is the issue here,during longer works data stacks in it,rendering less and less memory available for windows to use at given time.
Then,if u order some "bigger" command,like vray for instance,the windows doesnt' have enough free memory at the time and it just crashes due to shortage of memory.

Velktri

I have an HPE-450f computer with an intel i7 processor and 8 gigs of RAM. The graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 5770 aswell. I guessed RAM was the issue. Would there be anything in the background causing problems?

JamesWild

4evra wrote: »

I would guess that RAM is the issue here,during longer works data stacks in it,rendering less and less memory available for windows to use at given time./QUOTE]

Citation needed.

If you're talking about memory fragmentation or leaks, that should be solved just by restarting Maya. Memory leaks shouldn't cause much issue on 64-bit because the leaks usually end up being shoved in the pagefile and doing no damage except temporarily using up disk space.

Exporting the car as .obj exports just the vertices and polygons, and much of the model's other data is generated on import. It's possible some data about the model has become corrupt (it happens, bad RAM is common and even "good" RAM has a short MTBF) and importing it again forces this to happen. This is often the case with Max, I find; apparrent structural problems in models are common with models imported from Blender, which look fine until you edit something at which point the normals go bezerk. Exporting to obj and importing again solves it. For reference this machine passes a full Memtest86.

It'd be nice if there was a way to quickly perform an internal export and import in one click, it shouldn't be destructive under most circumstances.