Maya Hanging/Crashing

[ross_coe]

Hey folks

Wonder if anyone can help. I've been making a head in Maya, which at the moment is more or less finished and has about 1800 polys (unsmoothed). Now, I'm just doing some tweaks and cleaning up the mesh, but for some reason if I try to delete an edge or a poly, Maya hangs and I has to ctrl-alt-delete to shut it down and reboot.

It's driving me absolutely nuts.....especially coz it's a 3 sided poly I'm trying to fix, and it leaves a nasty little bump in the nose when smoothed.
I seem to get the same hanging problem when I want to move some UVs in the UV editor.

Oh, I'm wondering if it might be something to do with the mesh of the head itself, coz if I create a new cube in the same scene and delete an edge or poly it's fine! I've mirrored the geometry of the head, and deleted all the history, so there's no clutter that it has to deal with. Is there any way to check that the geometry isn't screwy?

And when Maya, the task manager says my CPU is running at 100%....so it appears Maya must be doing something. But 100% just to delete a single edge or poly???

Finally, should a 1800 poly head file be 26Mb in size? Seems a little big....I'm sure it'd only be about 2Mb in max at the most. Maybe the file is the problem?

Please can someone help.....before I go MAD!!!!!!

Cheers folks

[ross_coe]

OK, I fixed the problem. So in case anyone else has similar problems I'll descibe what I did :p

It seems that the problem was the way in which Maya keeps information about any tweaking you do to a polygon mesh. This information must be stored in the saved file....hence the 26 meg file size. Just by tweaking some vert, the file size increases. Once it gets as high as 26 megs for a 1800 polygon object, things start to slow down. Even if all history has been deleted.

So simply by creating a new polygon cube in the scene, then shift selecting the troublesome mesh and going to polygon--->combine to attach the dodgy object to the cube, and then deleting history immediately after that....it seems to reset the mesh. From there it's easy enough to delete the polygons of the cube part of the object so that your left with the original mesh :) And saving immediately after this will make the file size about 500 to 800 KB. But then as soon as you shift a bunch of verts and resave the file, the size begins to climb. So this combining of objects has to be done quite regularly.

If anyone knows why Maya seems to do this....it'd be great if you could explain it to me :p Seems a little odd really.