[jfrancis]

I have the latest versions of everything running on an 8 core Mac with 16 Gig ram

Maxwell hangs either when I launch it from Maya or when I try to export from Maya.

It exports enthusiastically for a while, then simply stops about 3/4 of the way through.

[Mihnea Balta]

So is it the exporter that hangs? Is it a large scene? How much memory is it using when it hangs? Does the memory usage stay constant when it's hanged, or does it keep increasing? Does it do it with every scene, or a particular scene? If it's a single scene which triggers this, could you send it to me?

The export progress bar is based on the number of objects, not the total poly count, so if you have lots of small objects and a really large object in your scene, the bar will advance quickly while the plug-in is processing the small objects, then appear hanged when it encounters the large one.

[jfrancis]

Thanks for getting back to me. It's midnight here in LA at the moment. I'll check into it in detail as you suggest tomorrow morning.

[jfrancis]

Memory consumption appears to be fine.

Hiding certain pieces of geometry seems to help, but I can't seem to pin it down to a single problem piece.

Some of the geometry was produced in Sketchup and imported as an .obj file. The sketchup file has been oddly heavy with pre-existing sketchup shaders I've tried to get rid of. The Sketchup geometry is also oddly constructed - long thin polys, n-sided polys, weird interpenetrations. I tried at least triangulating all the polys.

I'd love to send you the file. How shall I do that?

[Mihnea Balta]

Check your private messages please.

[Mihnea Balta]

The file you've sent me exports OK on my machine with all the display layers enabled. Judging from the image paths in the scene, I assume you're on OSX. Maya needs 2.4 GB of memory to open that scene, and the Maxwell plug-in needs about 600 MB more to export it. Since Maya is 32-bit on OSX, that's close to the process memory limit, so maybe it just runs out of memory in your case.

Did you try exporting the scene from Windows? Does it start working if you hide some of the display layers? Can you check Maya's virtual memory usage and CPU usage in the Activity Monitor when it appears hanged?

[jfrancis]

wow. I had no idea.

That's a work machine.

great info. thank you.

[jfrancis]

If I upgrade to Maya 2011 for Mac OSX 64-bit will the Maya plugin work?

If the Maya plugin doesn't work can I still use it with Maxwell standalone? (I assume yes)

[jfrancis]

This explains why I could not narrow it down to a single bad part, but hiding parts helped. It WAS a memory problem, even though I thought I had 16 Gig RAM

[Mihnea Balta]

We're working on a plug-in for Maya 2011. Usually supporting a new version of Maya requires just adding a new project configuration and building, so it's a matter of hours. This time however, due to Maya's switch to Qt, it's quite a bit of work, so it's not ready yet.

You can still use Maxwell standalone without a 2011 plug-in, but you won't be able to get your scenes to it, unless you want to export to OBJ and set up your materials in Studio.

[jfrancis]

So I could do all my Maya 2010 work on a 64 bit PC and if I use 64 bit macs running render nodes for Maya then they would benefit from the full 16 Gig ram because only Maya 2010 on mac is 32 bits. Maxwell render nodes are still going to be 64 bits?

1 x 64 bit PC running Maya 2010 w/ Maxwell plugin to do GUI work.

2 x 64 bit Mac OSX machines running Maxwell as rendernode only.

[Mihnea Balta]

Maxwell is 64-bit on OSX too (even the renderer GUI and Studio are), so that will work if you use the Maxwell network system to distribute the jobs over the network (which is the recommended way to do network rendering anyway). If you use something that's based on Maya batch rendering, you will run into memory problems again.

[jfrancis]

excellent; thanks!

[jfrancis]

Is there anything stopping me from running Maya 2010 and Maxwell on Fedora 64 bit (or Windows 64 bit) in dual boot on my Mac?

[Mihnea Balta]

No. The only thing to watch out for is the texture paths, since they will be different between various operating systems. If the texture files are under the sourceimages directory of the Maya project, the plug-in will find them automatically, even if the path doesn't match. If not, you might have to use the search path functionality of the plug-in, or the pack&go feature before sending the job to the render farm.

PS: I'd really recommend Windows for the workstation, Maya on Linux isn't exactly great.