Maya hangs on complex scene renders

[Oprime2007]

Hi There!

I have a problem rendering my scenes, that is if they get to complicated, they just won’t render anymore.

I was working on a short movie (personal project) and had just finished the first shot. It is an Antarctic landscape with an ocean created with Realflow. I’m trying to render it out using Mental Ray. But when I import the ocean, the scene just won’t render anymore, my system just hangs! First I thought it was a Realflow problem. When I lowered the polygon amount on the ocean the problem is over, but then I’m not getting the result I want. And the overall scene is not that complicated.

Another example; I created a pile of VHS tapes mostly with nurbs surfaces. The problem occurs again. The system won’t render (Mental Ray) and hangs. Rendering one VHS tape works fine, but a pile of them, won’t work. I tried to drop the tessellation on the surfaces, and that won’t work. Even the software renderer with raytracing on hangs.

I got a ‘little’ frustrated so a bought myself a whole new machine with alot of power, because an obvious reason would be that my system just can’t handle my scenes.

This is what I got:

Asus P5N32SLI SE Motherboard with Intel E6600 2,4 – 4 MB Cache CPU with 2 GB of 800 Mhz RAM and a SLI Nvidia Geforce 7950 GX2 (2x) with 1 GB of Ram.

So I opened my scenes (the opening shot for my short movie and the pile of VHS tapes), and Damn! The same thing happens, the system hangs…..

I had Maya 6.5 installed and I bought 7.0, but then again, no result.

Now I’m just lost…. And broke,… I cannot think of anything else anymore that would solve the problem. I posted the VHS scene as an attachment. Maybe someone can look at it and see what I am doing wrong.

Please please please help me… I need your advise…

Regards, Bob.

Download the scene using the following URL: http://www.asura.nl/download/VHSTape.zip

( I have zipped the scene file, because it’s orginional size is 48 MB, zipped is just 12,4 )

[Foxter888]

well I downloaded your scene and it seems to have an error so I couldn't open it cuz maybe you didn't upload it right but anyways try to do things to make the scene smaller such as go to edit>delete all>by history meaning that if you delete all the history it might render more faster cuz you might have to much information and about mental ray you have to make sure that you have a camera or it won't render and it would apear as an error and you have lights because it won't render if you have that default light anyways... msg back if you have a better efficiency on your work...