Any tips on working on big Maya scenes with lots of objects ?

sculptn

At the moment using good naming conventions,groups and layers. Anything else I can to do manage this scene ? Also would using instances instead of duplicates for repeating objects make the file size smaller,scene run faster its got pretty slow. Are there any downsides to using them come render time ?

.Wiki

We are mostly using references when its going to big maya or softimage scenes. Try setting up parts of your scene like foreground and background as a reference with an low poly proxy. So you are able to hide parts of the scene which dont matter at the moment and the filesize is quite low because the referenced geometry is in another file .

You can also use charakters as references. For example you got a lowpoly proxy character with a rough skinning applied and when it comes to rendering the highpoly character with all the fancy materials and so on gets loaded by maya.

sculptn

Great tips there thank you .Wiki I will give that a go. The instances idea would not be helpful then if there lots of objects the exact same size texture etc ?

CheeseOnToast

Are you importing a lot? This can leave a ton of trash nodes which really slow everything down. Check the outliner and uncheck "dag objects only" to see all the other crap. Quite a lot of it is neccessary, but you might find loads of redundant camera nodes, for example.

sculptn

Nice one CheeseOnToast I am never sure which I can safely delete but will check it for sure. Thanks.

Deadly Nightshade

"Scene assembly" and "References"

sculptn

Thanks Nightshade I dont know if 2011 has that feature will check it out though

Bellsey

References have been around for ages and are commonly used.

Scene Assembly is new and only appeared in the extension release of Maya 2013. I would definitely advise people to look into this feature. It's perhaps seen as the next logical step for referencing.

onionhead_o

I would make a master group for the whole scene. groups things based on UVs/Shaders/Pivots. Combine things that should be together instead of grouping which depends on your scene. (too many groups can cause headaches)

In terms of Naming convention, name it in a way that is easily selectable with select by name. Imagine if you have hundreds of barrels in the scene named as pcylinder and polysurface, it would be hard to select them all at once. It you name it all as "Barrel" you can easily select all of them at once. Im sure a lot people know this, but I think its worth mentioning cuz a lot of time ppl forget.

I had so many times where i recieved a scene from someone that things werent named properly. I had to go through the whole scene and select stuff one by one to rename stuff.