Hi all

I'm working on making a short science fiction movie with all the special effects (blizzard, cloth, hair, explosions, lasers) in Maya 2008 Unlimited and I occassionally run into out of memory messages.

I have a Pentium-4 PC with 2GB RAM, 13.6GB hard disk (only Maya is installed) running Windows XP Pro 32-bit and NVidia's GeForce 400 graphics card with 256MB RAM. I've limited the undos to 5 and set the swap size to between 2048MB - 4096MB and turned on the /3GB switch in boot.ini.

But I'm still getting out of memory occassionally and interactive animation viewing in Maya is slow (like cloth and hair). I often use high poly model (such as man mesh) and then import another high poly model (such a suit mesh) and when I do things like extensive scaling and running animation on cloth and hair, my PC crashes. I also have not been able to batch render a 200 frame animation scene involving particles for a snow blizzard scene. I have done it from the command line, etc but Maya batch render crashes usually when I get to Frame 74. When I start to render from Frame 74 onwards, the particle animation seems to have stopped and Maya says I do not have a cache file. How do I set one up?

I also do high poly head shots - importing the head.mb and eyes.mb and then creating a hair system. My PC normally crashes when I start to do interactive test animations to see the behaviour of my hair.

I want to know how the Hollywood guys do all those superb animation scene - complex, full of details and at high speed without experiencing a crash. Do they use Linux and Maya for Linux and Linux machines with large memories such as 32-64GB? How would such a machine compare with the latest Windows graphic machine (64-bit Windows Vista or 7 with say 8-16GB RAM) when creating all those complex special effects of Hollywood?