Maya takes forever to load files and references

[Anonymous]

Hey, I'm in huge trouble, for whatever reason, my computer cannot handle creating a scene to which I want to import references of two characters(rigged, textured) and an environment(not even final version). It just takes forever to open files or to import them, after that the program works fine. Files are not small, the environment is 240 mb the characters are 150 mb, 180 mb and 16 mb.

I'm using maya 2018 student version, my PC specifications:

Processor i5-4460S 2.90 Ghz

Ram: 8 GB

Windows 10

GeForce GTX 960 (also nvidea experience is running in the background as I work)

I need help quick, otherwise, I won't be able to work on my diploma project, please!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous 

You can try clearing history and any thing unnecessary from the reference files but it may just come down to the sheer size of the files and your PC hardware doing its best to load everything.

When you get a chance, can you please zip and attach the scene file here or via dropbox/google drive or another file sharing program so I can take a look at it? If the file is confidential or under NDA please send it to me in a private message instead of posting it here.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Maybe you just not have enough RAM (8GB only) for this action and Windows needs to swap some data to disk.

I highly recommend to get at least 16GB RAM if you want to work with more complex and data heavy scenes.

[Anonymous]

Hey, thanks for quick reply, I will gladly send You the files if You provide an email adress.

[Anonymous]

I'm afraid that this is not the case since my friend how has less RAM on his pc has no problem opening these scenes. But it may be because he does not have the textures, sent him just models with links to textures.

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous 

How long does it take to open on your machine? My machine is pretty powerful and it still took like 5+ minutes to load just the environment let alone the rigged characters.

Since your hardware is a good bit less powerful then mine its not surprising it may take a good few minutes for everything to load.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Without textures the usage of system resources can be drastically reduced, based on texture amount and size.

[Anonymous]

What would You suggest then, unless I find a different solution? I need to put characters in a scene, position them, set up the lights and render. Is there a way to work in a scene without textures(just the paths so that I won't have to assign everything again) and then do something so that textures will appear on models? Because otherwise, I will probably need to get this additional RAM.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Without a scene-file i can't confirm if RAM is the problem.

Also what means "takes forever", please provide numbers and units.

You can try disabling Hardware Texturing in Viewport.

[Anonymous]

It takes somewhere around the same amount of time, maybe a bit less, before Maya unfreezes and lets me move the camera or do anything. Do You have any idea why does it work so slowly?

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous 

You said Maya works fine once the scene loads right? I had some slight lag when navigating the viewport but nothing too crazy, it just takes a bit to load intially.

Like @mspeer  said you can try disabling Hardware Texturing in Viewport you could also try changing the Rendering Engine settings in the Display tab of the Settings/Preferences window.

Also you'll want to check and see if your GPU driver is up to date.

Steps to update your drivers can be found here!

[Anonymous]

Now I reinstaled Maya and it feels like it went a bit faster but loading file was around 1 minute and than 90.1 sec for reading file according to console pop-up. It all took around 2 minutes.

[Anonymous]

Hardware Texturing was disabled from the beginning, I changed the rendering engine to a different one, now I'm updating the graphics card drivers.

[Anonymous]

After doing all of the things You suggested it does not seem to work any faster. Woj_Rigged file takes 12 sec to read but I still need to wait about a minute or two before I can move or do anything. Any other suggestions? What freaks me out is that my friend manages to open the scenes quickly without more RAM than I have.

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

You may hit your RAM limit as here the overall RAM usage goes beyond 8GB even without textures.

But the main problem seems to be that the scenes are not optimized and cluttered with tens of thousands of nodes (environment scene has more than 20 000 shape nodes and more than 100 000 transform nodes) and extremely long node names.

Clean up your scenes (delete history,...) and they will open much faster.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, how do I clean up the scene and the amount of nodes? Is there a
tutorial on how to do it?

[mspeer]

Hi!

Sorry i don't know any tutorials.

In general, remove everything you don't need, combine everything you don't need separated and replace those objects you don't need to edit in the scene by proxies or cache files.

Delete history and Optimize Scene Size can be helpful.

I was able to reduce loading time of the scene "sala_ograniczonamb.mb" from 120 sec to less than 2 sec, just by removing unnecessary nodes (kept less than 2000 shape and transform nodes).

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot, optimizing scene size shaved off more than 100 Mb from my character, but how exactly did You manage to reduce the size of the environment "sala_ograniczona". Optimizing scene did not help a bit in this case.

[Anonymous]

Okay, thanks to Your help, I've reduced my scenes by hundreds of Mb. I used optimizing scene removing unknown nodes, deleting history and in case of the environment, I selected all geometry I could see on the scene and exported selection dropping 200 Mb.

Thanks for help and efficient support

[mspeer]

Hi!

I am glad you figured out what worked best for you to reduce the scene size of the scenes.