Attribute Editor Crash
 

Hey there,

3D modelling assignments for university have led me to Maya 8.5 PLE. However, while working through the most basic tutorials, I'm encountering a serious problem, and now I fear that this assignment will be impossible for me to finish. Searching for the problem on the Web yielded no results.

A description of what's happening: in the last phase of the Maya Basics tutorial, we're asked to assign a material to our shapes (Blinn with a certain colour). Following the instructions, the Attribute Editor is opened and I have just created the Blinn material. But then, as I choose one of my objects from the 'Selected' drop-down box, the program appears to be loading data for a second and then just crashes. I get a message saying an unknown error has occured and that the program needs to be shut down. This happened multiple times in a row at the exact same moment, so it wasn't coincidental.

As said, this happens in the PLE version Maya 8.5. My PC is a weird story; since my old desktop one is too weak to run the program, I had to switch to a notebook, which happens to run on Windows Vista Home Premium (indeed, I don't think it was on the specifications list, but I've read comments of others who had no problems with it). It has 1 GB of memory and its graphics card should be fairly new; I never paid much attention to such things, though, so I'm no expert. However, I highly doubt I'll have the chance to upgrade my system before the assignment is due.

Short version (sorry, I'm wordy):
- Maya 8.5 PLE crashes whenever I want to look up the material properties of an object (or so it seems);
- I'm using a fairly new Vista Home Premium notebook with 1GB of memory. Expansion or switch of system is most likely no option within the time frame.

Any ideas? Does this sound familiar? Is it a compatibility problem, or did I miss some hidden menu option or trick that might fix the issue?

I sincerely hope someone's out there who knows what to do. If there's any other information you need in order to help, please let me know.

Thanks in advance,
Woep

Sounds strange, I doubt its the hardware....

If you import your secen into a new scene does it still do it?

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter which file I use; I tried importing, starting over and even working with just one primitive object in my scene. Just creating a new scene, adding a sphere and following the same steps (selecting, then choosing a material, then choosing the object from the Selected drop-down menu) forces me to quit and retry.

Really sounds strange, maybe a re-install? If that doest work maybe re-download the PLE as it migth have been corrupted???

Other than that i'm a bit stumpped.

Hm, I tried re-downloading and re-installing the whole package, and it still doesn't work. I'll have to take this thing with me to the lecture today and hope they'll propose a fitting solution-- chances are they'll redirect me to an alternative modelling tool, even though Maya has my preference.

For now, thanks for helping, gster. If there's anyone else who has suspicions, please let me know by replying. Hopefully this problem will be solved someday soon, so that I can enjoy my membership here further. :)

Just thought, you mentioned that your using a laptop, whats the graphics card? as Maya can be tempramental with graphics.

The notebook is a HP Pavilion dv6000, which has a Nvidia GeForce Go 7500 graphics card.

That should be fine for it, again i'm stumped... Sorry, If I hear of that problem I'll give you a shout, also try posting on CGtalk, you might get some joy there

This is a wild guess, but I think its your graphics card. GeForces are not officially supported by Maya. It might work flawlessly for some people, but for others it cause all sorts of problems.

I would try to install PLE on another computer with something like a Radeon (maybe a friend can help) and see if it works.

I have fixed this when i got this problem too, Just delete the maya folder on my documents, (Buckup the saves and shelves)then start maya to create another one then move your backups to it. Hope it helps