CGTalk - complex scene and maya stability problem

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viper_07

07-23-2003, 03:57 PM

my system is Althon 1.7G XP, 768 ram, Geforce FX 5200, windows XP pro, maya 4.0

i 'm doing a complex scene including 4 characters full rigged with advanced skeleton v.1.6 MEL and complex constraints, and textured with all texture file totally over 200mb. each char has low res and high res, each high res is more than 400k polygons
and the set and props is about 150K polygon
all these add up to a .mb file of 145 mb
when loaded it eats up all my 524 free ram resoruces, and when rendered it takes all too and can't render 1k resolution
it takes more than 1 min to open the file and 25 seconds to save one time

becus of its complexity i tried using reference, but i tried and find the complexity can't be handled by maya's reference system and creating more problems and halts.
so i decide to keep it all in a single file.

the problem is it still halts very often when i animate it: more than 30 times a day: it's totally non-workable

it ususally halts when i disaply all high res models and rotate them, play them, etc

i 'm suspecting it is my display driver version
i'm using GF FX 5200, is there any sigguestion for the most stable driver version for it? or any other possible solution?

and i would really appreciate if anyone advice me how I can manage this complex scene better!

thanks a lot

M_Orlich

07-23-2003, 08:26 PM

your video card sounds suspect. maybe get a new one or look into setting up a rendering farm with some used computers picked on the cheap.

mo

alexentremont

07-23-2003, 08:27 PM

Have you considered buying more RAM (say double the current amount)?

viper_07

07-24-2003, 11:26 AM

yes i will upgrade but not within the current project period.
and my inno GF FX 5200 is a new one

any sugguestion on how to cope with this complexity and system crash halt without upgrading ?
really frustrated...

thanks!!!!!!!!

ajk48n

07-24-2003, 12:41 PM

I recently did a scene with 21 characters. Nothing was too high res, but if everything was displayed at once, the scene would barely move. I made everything that could be animated seperately a different layer. This way I could hide every layer except the one I was animating at the moment. I also had extreme low res standins for my props, basically just a cube.

I would also try hiding everything before you save, as that will sometimes speed things up saving as well as loading.

Doogie

07-24-2003, 02:41 PM

To fix your rendering problem there’s a couple things you can do. Try rendering via command line (then you can use the Ram your scenefile would normally take up). There's also stuff you can do to your textures to lower the RAM requirement for renders.

As for your stability problem, Maya doesn’t seem to handle lots of objects well, are you using Display Layers to hide what you aren't immediately using? Maya does even worse displaying instances opposed to duplicates.

Your video card might be the problem too. It may be new, but it still isn't fully supported by Maya. I've had transparency problems with my GeForce (as with others), but Alias warns of "stability problems and inadequate performance." This may be one of those.

I don't have any suggestion on drivers, but others are more stable than some (and should be looked in to since a new video card is expensive). I'm using 44.03 on a GeForce2GTS and haven't had any noticeable problems.

M_Orlich

07-24-2003, 04:38 PM

make sure you're using dmap shadows, not raytraced.

viper_07

07-25-2003, 04:35 AM

yes i already use display layers
and i use command line to render
and i also avoid using instances becus subD+instance+complex grouping= problems in shading and connection

i would like to know how people try to organize multiple shots
i use 1 file for 30 shots becus each file is 145mb. it's more convininet to be in a file
and how's the usability of reference, if the characters are complex.

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