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# 1 21-05-2007 , 05:47 PM
Registered User
Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 10

my container terminal

Hi! This is my first project in maya: a container terminal. I've been working for some weeks now, so I would be glad if I get some feedback and a little help... I’ve been trying to deal with some issues related to instances. Oh, and excuse me if I make a lot of mistakes since I haven’t practiced english lately… user added image

The container is a simple cube with the colour and bump channels mapped (maps created with corel). I used the cereal box tutorial in the maya help for UV mapping. I created different shaders for different shipping companies.

To create the first group of containers I duplicated as instance like 400-500 of those cubes. Rendered with mental ray and a little patience, but no problem. To fill with containers the whole terminal, I thought an option would be creating aligned groups of 500 or so containers. But after doing the second group of containers, mental ray crashes when I try to render. Moreover, some containers don’t appear in the viewport. Why?? I don’t know, maybe I messed something up in the hierarchies after duplicating “as instance” so many times… in fact I still get quite/very confused every time I happen to open the hypergraph. user added image

I need help. How would you create so many objects? Small groups of containers referenced in the main file for layer rendering?? Or different layers in smaller groups but in the same file? Are instances reliable?
I hope somebody can give me some advice on this. By the way, is it better to save as *.ma than *.mb?

Thanks in advance!