Maya 2009 crashing when trying to "average normals" on high poly mesh...

t4paN

So, I ve got this 1.6mil tri's sculpt in Maya, and while I have no problems in max 9, in maya it crashes when I try to average its normals. I'm running both programs in their 64bit versions, I'm running windaz xp64 and I've got 8 gigs of ram.

Rest of my system is a dual core 2.6something 8800gt.

It makes me sad

kodde

A few general ideas for any kind of Maya problem.

Did you restart Maya? (Already answered I suppose)
Did you try this in a new fresh scene on a simplified object?
Did you restart your computer?
Did you delete your history on the object?
Are you using High Quality Render? Try disabling.
Did you try deleting your \Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\Maya\2009\prefs folder and force Maya to revert to default settings?
Did you try exporting your object and importing it in a new scene?

MoP

Uh, why do you want to average the normals of a highpoly sculpt?
Surely you just want to set it all to Soft Edges? Average Normals is a completely different tool.

t4paN

kodde wrote: »

A few general ideas for any kind of Maya problem.

Did you restart Maya? (Already answered I suppose)
Did you try this in a new fresh scene on a simplified object?
Did you restart your computer?
Did you delete your history on the object?
Are you using High Quality Render? Try disabling.
Did you try deleting your Documents and SettingsuserMy DocumentsMaya2009prefs folder and force Maya to revert to default settings?
Did you try exporting your object and importing it in a new scene?

Restart Maya, computer, simplified objects work fine, both low and hiq rendering, i didn't delete the prefs, the object is clean (no history).

MoP wrote: »

Uh, why do you want to average the normals of a highpoly sculpt?
Surely you just want to set it all to Soft Edges? Average Normals is a completely different tool.

Well, the thing is I'm a complete newb in maya so I thought creating a character from scratch would teach me the basics. I want it to be smooth like when you assign a smoothing group number in max. Can you please explain the difference between average normals and soft edges? So far I've been switching between set to face and average normals to view the model smoothed and flat shaded...


BTW I just tried soften edge and it works a treat, thanks for the tip!

MoP

Average Normals will do just what it says... it will try to average all the vertex normals within a certain tolerance (like if one is close to the direction of another, it'll average their directions so they both point the same way). Most of the time it's not what you want, it's only useful in certain specific cases (like if you have two separate objects that you want the normals to be identical across a seam).

Soften Edge is what you'll want 99% of the time. Harden edge = all faceted shading, soften edge = all smooth shading. You can select individual edges to harden/soften them instead of the whole object, and using this method you can get a much faster result than messing around with Smoothing Groups in Max.

kodde

Like MoP said, you want to use Soft/Hard Edge command.

t4paN wrote: »

...simplified objects work fine...

For future refence, here's a hint. Since it works fine with a simplified object in a new scene then the problem is most likely in your specific scene rather than your instance of Maya.

MoP

TBH i think the problem is just that Maya's Average Normals command probably can't handle dealing with over a one and a half million vertices... it really doesn't make much sense to run that command on an object that dense either, so I'm not surprised they haven't tested it to that level.

kodde

MoP wrote: »

TBH i think the problem is just that Maya's Average Normals command probably can't handle dealing with over a one and a half million vertices... it really doesn't make much sense to run that command on an object that dense either, so I'm not surprised they haven't tested it to that level.

Yes you might be right. I was just wanted to help the guy get some routine on troubleshooting.

Wouldn't an overload of data as you are referring to usually result in the program being unresponsive for a long while?

I was actually having such an issue earlier today. I had a 200k object which I applied a Separate command to on a few selected faces. Now Maya would "freeze" for a minute or so, then act really really sluggish. At first i figured "Probably because all of the construction history", turns out it was all the temporary Undo data. Point was, Maya never crashed, just because unresponsive for long periods of time.

t4paN

kodde wrote: »

Yes you might be right. I was just wanted to help the guy get some routine on troubleshooting.

Wouldn't an overload of data as you are referring to usually result in the program being unresponsive for a long while?

I was actually having such an issue earlier today. I had a 200k object which I applied a Separate command to on a few selected faces. Now Maya would "freeze" for a minute or so, then act really really sluggish. At first i figured "Probably because all of the construction history", turns out it was all the temporary Undo data. Point was, Maya never crashed, just because unresponsive for long periods of time.

Actually, I thought it was pretty obvious that the problem was in the current scene, I was just asking for a workaround (which turned out to be the correct way to do it and not a workaround). Anyway thanks for the help guys, I'm all set to bake now.

BTW Maya would remain unresponsive more than 20 minutes the third time I tried it, and I terminated the process through the task manager every time. So, yeah it wasn't a crash per se, but it wasn't working either.

Anyway, thanks again.