Troubleshooting a troublesome scene, Maya 2018.
Ok so I'm preparing my final animation
for university and I've been building assets for the last few months. I decided
to upgrade to Maya 2018 because I wanted to make use of the new hair tools... I
was previously using 2016.
I've nearly finished the bedroom environment in which my animation will take
place, and I've been building models and placing them in the scene for months now.
I never had any issues until I upgraded to 2018, which confuses me as it's a project specific issue..
Now my problem is, when I first boot up Maya, if I load my scene, after a
little lag, it does eventually open. However, if I then try to
load another scene, from my environment scene, it causes Maya to freeze up
completely. I have saved it in both .mb and .ma formats - having the same problems with each of them. I don't get any error messages, it just becomes unusable and I have
to end task from the task manager. This happens if I try to make a new scene,
or open one that is already existing, it doesn't matter, the software crashes regardless.
This works exactly the same, the other way round. If I am working in another
scene (every other scene that I've opened works correctly, and I have no issues
jumping from scene to scene, outside of my environment file) and attempt to
open the bedroom, surprise surprise, Maya freezes and I have to end task. Now
I've tried exporting the scene as .fbx and .obj, but when I try .fbx, my cursor
disappears from Maya (?!) and I can't select anything, when I try as .obj I get the
same freezing as before.
When I try to open another scene from my environment, and hit the save option
before it launches, my current file gets to 98% saved and freezes, this is
the only instance when I see any evidence of the software actually attempting
to save/open the next file, in other situations Maya instantly dies. I'm at my
wits end with all of this now, I'm a little behind schedule and my progress
is slower than ever.
My renderer is redshift, and I've painted all the textures in Substance
Painter. Each texture has been exported in 4K and I'm aware that is bogging my
scene down but my pc should be able to handle it!
How do you go about troubleshooting an issue like this? Outside of what I have already tried? I could still technically animate with this scene, but it would require me to workaround the problem repeatedly, which obviously isn't ideal in the slightest. Any ideas, or feedback of any kind is very much appreciated. I've attached a render though it's obviously not much use, if anyone with more experience than me fancies taking a look at the scene file, let me know and I'll upload it/email it.
Thanks again guys.
Replies
In particular the following commands:
You can find the maya.env file at the following location:
C:\Users\<your-name>\Documents\maya\2018
Another option is to utilize instances and proxies as much as possible to minimize the active scene load - redshift supports their own version of proxy objects, which you can read about here (https://docs.redshift3d.com/display/RSDOCS/Proxies?product=maya)
You can also take a look at this redshift proxy tutorial by Saul Espinosa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=yPQQBiyX6RY).
I know it may be a little late at this point, but hopefully this helps in some way.
This is extremely interesting! I was considering importing everything as a reference and disabling what I didn't need. Would this have a similar effect or am I being optimistic?
I've used proxies in the past but not looked into the redshift ones yet, I'll look into this before I start rendering as it's taking about 5 minutes per frame atm and I need to produce a 3 - 4 minute animation by May! I will be trying those commands right away to see if it makes a difference!
It's never too late for sound advice bud! While I did resolve my issue at the time I'm still running into hiccups along the way (such is the nature of Maya, or maybe just 3D in general, right?).
Just to clarify, do I just remove those commands from the .env file itself? When it comes to that side of things I'm a bit clueless!
Thanks again mate, really appreciate the response.
maya.env is a text file, you'll want to copy/paste those lines into it. I wouldn't recommend disabling the console window, it can sometimes have useful info when the GPU crashes hard, but not hard enough to kill maya.
Thanks again for your reply! I did delete the history on everything and optimise the scene multiple times with no success. I guess I took the long way around and went through my individual models, exported each as a .ma file and re-imported everything into the scene placing it again and fixing any issues along the way. The scene is working perfectly now thankfully. I didn't think to delete it in halves, I should have done that really, I'll think to do so next time!
Okay I already pasted the lines in so I'll remove that one! Sounds like it could come in handy!
Thanks again for the help, can definitely use that advice going forward!
haha yeah that's so true! I find myself trying to solve problems a lot, it can be frustrating but satisfying when you finally fix it, and like you say it's a learning process. It does certainly seem that the smallest of things can cause Maya to freak out, it can be really annoying! But yeah everything is functioning now and I can carry on with my animation, so thanks for all the help! Hopefully it's smooth sailing from now... lol