Hi Everyone

I suffer with cerebral palsy and I go into mainstream schools and give talks on disability awareness etc, about ten years ago an old school teacher of mine leant me a number of 35 mm slides which she had taken during a career which covered nearly 30 years working within the special needs system. Many of these slides were showing a specialy adapted typewriter called a Possum.

At that time I scanned some of these slides and using After Effects and Morph Studio I made quite a boring little animation up showing how a Possum works. I have now spent quite a bit of this year making a much more interesting 3D animation and filmed myself in front of a green screen making the moves to work the Possum, and I was very happy how it all conposited together in After Effects.

However to finally sell the animation I went back into Maya 7 and temporally turned everything off and built a model of a wheelchair which I want to have myself sitting in while I work the Possum.

I made one side with the intention of duplicating it over in (-1) in X to give me the other side. Every time I tried to duplicate it I received a fatal error message and Maya shut down. I finally got around this by putting the big back wheel which has lots of chrome spokes onto its own layer and I turned it off but still selected the group and I was able to duplicate the group over and to my surprise it also duplicated the wheel even though it was turned off.

However now when I turn the other bits in the scene on, i.e. the Possum and the furniture in the room etc, I get an out of memory message and it is followed by another fatal error message and Maya shuts down. I tried saving the project as I turned different bits on but the same thing happened and now I can’t even open that project. As it starts to load I get an unexpected problem and Maya shuts down.

When I was turning the other objects in the room on I was getting an out of memory message, I am running with 2GB. So basically I have all my items modelled in my scene but if I turn them all on Maya crashes, has anybody got any ideas, I have been told because I am running XP pro the most amount of memory I can put in and windows would recognise is 3GB, is this right and does anyone feel it would make much difference, or has anybody got any other ideas about what I could do.

I have been in and deleted all the type history for all of the objects. I am thinking if the worst came to the worst I could go back to the last saved copy of the project I have which will open and try and finish of the modelling again and then drop down to wire frame then turn everything else on and try and line things up and then try and render from a text file but this would not be very easy, any suggestions?

Talking about rendering from a text file, following a question I asked a few months ago, someone gave me a link to a web page which gave a good out line and some good instructions for rendering in using a text file, similarly somebody else gave me a link to a web page which shows you a way to get things like belts moving on a path, I think the project they were doing was tank treads but it would be the same for belts etc. I have had a system crash and I have lost this information can anybody give me these links again?

Thanks
Trikeman