Only began using Maya this week and I wanted to start with some very basic modeling, so I've built a wall. Being new and knowing nearly nothing about 3D modeling, I built it out of individual bricks. So there are several hundred objects in the scene.

I've combined all the bricks (polygon cubes with a lot of faces/edges, because they needed to be battered and broken) into sections of wall, and deleted the histories of the new polygon surfaces. I guess this means the program has less to deal with, but it's still trying to process a lot of information.

Is there any way of getting rid of some of the stuff I don't need (for instance, information relating to the sides of walls away from camera) or otherwise simplifying the scene without losing the details?

Mike