Can Maya use more than 1gb of RAM?
 

I was working on a project in Maya that had a lot of very dense NURBS surfaces that I had imported from an IGES file. For some reason, when I try to duplicate the model many times (think of a mechanical octopus with lots of details), Maya gives me memory allocation errors and either:

1.) Won't duplicate the model any further
2.) Won't render anything because of memory errors
3.) Crashes outright

I noticed, after much much testing and retesting, that it seems that Maya refused to use more than 1gb of RAM. I have 1.5gb of DDR RAM, but Maya would always get up to 1gb (almost exactly) and then would start giving error messages. I could see in Task Manager though that there was still 500mb of unused RAM.

I know I'm not the only one with this problem, but I have yet to see anyone come up with a solution. Has anyone found a fix that I have yet to come across? Thanks in advance.

Phobos

i use 2 gig of RAM at work with no problems, and one gig at home, but I'm on Linux so I dont have to deal with crappy windows memory allocation. I highly doubt it's the RAM as maya is designed to utilise large amounts of RAM. Must be something else I'm afraid.

Alan

I know I've seen other people who have had the same issues as well, and they were also running Windows. The RAM is brand new, so I know it's not a hardware issue.

Do you think that it could be the fact that it was an imported IGES file? Or do you think it's that I run Windows? Are there any manual tweaks that I can make that might be set wrong? I looked through the preferences but wasn't able to see anything useful.

Thanks.

well i mostly use 512mb of ram and i never got in any weird trouble.
maybe because i don't make any complex scenes yet :D

Here's a good way of testing it to see if it happens to you as well....


1) Make a polygon sphere with 500x500 divisions.
2) Resize the sphere so that X,Y, and Z all equal 0.1
3) Duplicate the sphere using the duplicate options. Duplicate it by moving it along one axis 0.4, and duplicate it 35 times.

This method should leave you with 36 sphere's, all of which have an insane number of polys in them. Mine gives me a memory dump when doing this, and I end up with like 32 or 33 spheres.

Maybe it's just something wrong with my pc. If no one else gets this error, then I'm going to start investigating hardware or software defects. :(

memory allocation errors are mostly due to faulty ram sticks... try removing one of the sticks and try again... just for verification purposes... and if it still says the same thing, try dumping everything in windows that is running ( task manager ) and try... best o' luck

U could try a free program called FreeRAM

I will try to swap around my RAM sticks. Two of the sticks are brand new, the other is only like a year or so old. None have been overclocked or anything, and none give me any errors, but I have had issues before when I got my new ram, so this could be attributed to that.

I tried one of those ram-freeing programs and it didn't help. :(

Thanks!