Ambient Occlusion crashing Maya

Raymond Arnold

I'm working with a model in Maya 2008, about 12,000 tris. I'd like to render an AO pass. I've been creating a separate render layer, applying the Occlusion preset. But in the past few weeks it's started taking longer and longer to load the Occlusion layer. Now it pretty much crashes every time I even try to click on the layer (I think the frequency of crashing and longer loading times corrosponded with the model getting more complex).

Is this just how AO is, and if I'm running on a relatively slow computer I'm just screwed, or is there a better way to be doing this that won't be resulting in crashes? When it DOESN'T crash (but still takes a long time to display the render layer), afterwards it renders just fine.

I'm running on a Macbook Pro, 2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo,

4 GB of Memory

Raymond Arnold

Apparently so long as I make sure I'm in wireframe mode first, it works fine. It still seems to me it shouldn't be crashing just because it's trying to display the black AO shader.