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View Full Version : Maya is acting strange with big projects

erwin1978
03-15-2003, 09:24 PM
Whenever I work on a big project, after a while, the undo stops working; hitting crtl+z does nothing and I would have to go to the menu to undo. Also, typing is impossible: if I type a number it would come out as some jibberish characters and same goes for letters. The only way to resolve this is by restarting Maya. I don't notice the problem when I'm only working on say an ear model. What could be the problem?
thesaint
03-15-2003, 11:39 PM
did you know (and i have no idea if this will solve your problem) that as a default you do not need to press the Ctrl button to undo?
Just the 'z' is enough.

Your problem almost certainly lies in the RAM available to Maya.
When you load a large scene with complex data sets and large geometery you cause Maya to allocate substantial amounts of RAM. Undo's are resident to the RAM, so if your RAM is limited (ie 512-1024 MB) Maya will use all the availble RAM and leave nothing left for the undo queue.

I hope i explained that clearly enough :-)
erwin1978
03-16-2003, 01:28 AM
That makes sense. So what you're saying is that there's no hope for me and that I should just stick to making spheres. So there's no workaround this? That sucks. They should have the undos on the harddrive then.

I have 512MB of ram; I would think that's sufficient coz even pros only have 1GB of ram. Also, the biggest files I have consisted of a robot and a human head. I don't think those are that taxing.
beaker
03-16-2003, 07:38 AM
do you have infinate undo on? If so that could be your problem(especially with large operations). Make it finate between 10-50
GrafOrlok
03-16-2003, 09:23 AM
I would say 512 is a bit low. Maya and the system usses around 300MB, which leaves 200 for the project. With a gigabyte RAM youl be left with 700MB for the project. That's a considerable difference. My advice is: get as much RAM you can! Nothing speeds up the system more.
Norb
03-16-2003, 09:51 AM
If your caps lock is on, the undo gets disabled, or just doesn't work, I'm not sure which...
FreeQ
03-16-2003, 10:08 AM
I strongly recommend to all, buy as possible much DIMMs in March. Price may gets high peak by April, I sense!
erwin1978
03-16-2003, 05:25 PM
The biggest .mb file I have is 700KB and it doesn't even consist of any texture files, so why does it take so much memory?
GrafOrlok
03-16-2003, 07:51 PM
Doesn't sound especially heavy... Didn't you say this apeared whenever you work on larger projects...;) When you are experiencing these problems push Ctrl+Alt+Esc to bring up the tast manager and check how much RAM is used. You might have a whole bunch of unnecessary background programs and stuff that consumes your RAM. If the "Mem Usage" is pretty low, then we can judge out the "RAM theory".
dave_baer
03-17-2003, 05:09 AM
Another thing to try is to limit the amount of undo's you have Maya set to. Don't set it to infinite, keep it down to around 100 or so. Think about it... Maya has to remember all those steps to undo. The fewer undo steps you have, the more memory is freed up for the project.

I keep mine set to finite:100
floguyep
03-17-2003, 05:18 AM
Hmm just a thought but try clearing all your history and see if that helps.
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