Big quantities
 

Hey guys, I need some help from you that are more experienced on the arts of Maya than me. I've got two questions:

1. Is there a way of working with big quantities of primitives at once without clogging my machine or my rendering? For exemple: I have to make a large surface made up of spheres (like a big bunch of balls covering the floor). If not, is there another way of achieving the wanted effect, given that I need details of the spheres, so I can't just use an image projection on a plane?

2. Is there a way of making small looping clips (like the "Movie Clips" of Macromedia Flash) along my movie, without having to work every loop separately? For instance, I need some balls to constantly pass through a hole while the rest of my scene is rolling.

I hope you got what I wanted to ask, and I hope you could help me somehow. I thank you, already...

For the looping animation, learn up on expressions, it should help, with a tiny bit of MEL magic, its easy.

I don't really know how you would solve the rendering problem of a faster rendering of a lot of primitives without another renderer/raytracer with more advanced spatial subdivision sorting (and I don't know how you would get that without programming it, and maya's KD tree raytracer is realy good, better then mine :p)

Well, hope that helped

cya later,
Matt :alien: