Modeling issues (Maya crashes while duplicating)

[RooftopAnimation]

Hi,

I haven't used Maya 2012 for modelling much, but one problem that seems to happen often is having Maya crash when duplicating an object. It's happened in numerous scenes from a scene with references and rigs to a fresh new scene with a cube with and without construction history.

Anyone else experienced this?

The other smaller issue I'm having is with the extrude tool, which up until this week was working as per normal. The head's up display for the extrude tool no longer shows up. And also it is no longer available as the last tool used, via the "g" key or the icon on the left. I know that the marking menu to extrude is a simple flick, but why are the above happening at all.

No new plugins or scripts have been added since last week. Any ideas on that one?

Any help would reduce much frustration.

kind regards,
Rooftop

[weshowe]

For your extrude tool, check that you have History on (it's the last icon before the render icons on the top row). A red 'X' indicates it is off. Extrude is one of a few tools that does not fully work without history.

<* Wes *>

[ekimberly001]

Also try deleting your prefs folder before starting up Maya. This folder can sometimes become corrupted, causing weird problems. It will be located under My Documents\maya\2012\prefs. A new one will be created when you start Maya.

[RooftopAnimation]

Hi,

Thanks for the responses guys. Today, hitting "g" uses extrude tool again, but no heads up display.

I'll have to try deleting my prefs folder 😕 Hopefully it sorts out the weirdness.

Regards,
Rooftop

[ekimberly001]

I've also had a problem with the manipulator disappearing for the extrude tool and enabling construction history fixed it.

[weshowe]

Most of the surface menu commands should be used with history, which allows curves to still be tweaked and the shape will follow. After I like the mesh, I save the file as a version, and then delete history and the curves and save that.

Incredibly, you can use more memory on certain operations with memory off than with it on. Operations like merging vertices on hefty sized meshes (>50K polys) with history off will save approx. 1K of RAM per-vertex... do the math, that is 50 Megabytes per Undo command. People started noticing it when their system became really slow after Windows started having to swap to the Pagefile.

But for ordinary modeling and animation I generally turn History off so I don't have to keep remembering to stop and 'delete all non-deformer history'.

<* Wes *>

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Finally found the answer.

do not use default duplicate, create a shelf button containing duplicate command, like this:

duplicate;

That's all!

You can make a hotkey for it as well. I've been using this for a couple of weeks now with no crash at all.

Cheers,

Ehsan HM