how to questions
 

when i go to render my characters or objects maya runs slow or stops why so, how do i rig my charactors, set up for animation in real player, [SIZE=3][COLOR=red][B]

The question is confusing me a little. When you say Maya runs slow or stops during rendering, are you batch rendering? If so, it could be because the Maya batch is taking too much of your resources, which you may not even have enough of in the first place.

Huh, you can animate in Real Player? Or do you mean, render out an animation to view in Real Player? You might want to take a look at the basic rigging/animation tuts in the help files and Mikes How to Render a Movie video.

when i go to render my character it makes maya stop running. is that because my poly count is to high or because my computer doesnt have enough ram or whatever to do so. o and how do i collapse a whole edge loop.

1. I don't know what's going on in your scene and I don't know your machine's specs, so I really can't answer that. Post some info on both if you can.

2. You can simply use "delete edge/vertex" under the Edit Mesh menu.