Maya File Runs really slowly and crashes whenever I move the time slider too fast

[Tygeromar]

Hey,

I'm doing a Previs assignment for Uni (so the animation and everything is very posed for pose and rough). But my file crashes almost every second and I have to save after every little movement in case it crashes. every time I move the time slider my fan in my PC gets really loud and when I look at the CPU in task manager when it does, it jumps to like 94% then crashes.

I've noticed my file size is kinda big. I was wondering if someone could look at my scene and see if there is anything that can be changed to downsize or improve the performance of my file or any basic tricks to fix the crashing.

thank

[Tygeromar]

Nevermind My maya file once compressed is still 300mb. Too big to upload

how ironic

[dariush]

How much RAM does your machine have? It may be playback cache that is sucking up your memory and causing slow downs and crashing. Try turning playback cache off:

You can change Cached Playback modes by right-clicking on the Time Slider to access Cahced Playback to toggle off:

Try disabling it to see if it gets more stable. If you have 8Gb, even 16Gb, it just might just be too low for a large scene, so not caching playback might save you some memory.

[hamsterHamster]

Without seeing file contents won't be possible to tell much, and for large files you can use any cloud sharing services, e.g. wetransfer or googledrive.
There are crashlog files in C:\Users\Yourusername\AppData\Local\Temp named MayaCrashLogYYMMDD.HHMM.log that contain information about your Maya's state, that is if it went through shutdown sequence, not simply closed itself. Post at least some of latest.
Disabling cache, as @dariush suggested, might have no effect - at least in M2019@32GbRAM even for not so complex scenes it gets disabled automatically - a yellow exclamation mark on the button and no progressing

[Tygeromar]

I've linked dropbox with both my files with the issues in them. hopefully, there is no issue with them, let me know otherwise.

as of my PC specs. my PC at home has 16GB of RAM. While my university PCs are 8GB.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vuairb1wm4c7stx/chase%2016%20-%20Copy.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l5wgkigva7f17vq/KeyFrame26%20-%20Copy.zip?dl=0

[hamsterHamster · Accepted solution]

Oh, boy.. why?!

KeyFrame26.mb - that is suicide assignment, as you are working there with scan models of crazy 7Mi tris of non-manifold geometry.. this is counterproductive, as purpose of previz is rapid scene prototyping. Also, so many textures are linked to a network drive, which for your and your school's computers is literally asking for trouble. The first thing, dump the scanned geo, use simple polyCubes, or at least use those as proxies, and export scans as References and unload; load when doing final renders. Then, relocate all the textures for the imagePlanes to your project.

chase16.mb - a better case, still network-linked textures present. Also, if you want more responsive Maya, consider replacing high-res car models with low-res proxies with textures located in the project (usually, sourceimages), yet better no textures at all.

Scrubbing the timeline did not crash, still auto-save froze Maya.

[Tygeromar]

awesome thank you so much. Ill makes these changes and hope they'll work. thank again for taking the time to look at any work. your amazing

[dariush]

Yeah, network textures can create big slow-downs. Nice, lol "suicide assignment"! Optimizing scenes is an artform.