Stuck on Project

# 1 18-04-2013 , 01:55 PM

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Im working on a project for school. Its a logo made up of a bunch of lego bricks. The logo is finished and made up of a lot of bricks. Rotating the view and panning lags a little but i need to shrink the whole logo down. Im trying to combine everything so that it will all shrink together properly. After combining everything, i press R to scale but Maya begins to not respond. I gave it time to load but no luck. My class would end before it would finish. Is there anything i can do to help stop this? Maybe clean up some stuff or decrease the amount of thinking it has to do? The project has to be finished ASAP. To keep in mind, every brick has a Sphong material to it with varying colors.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks!
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# 2 18-04-2013 , 05:01 PM

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Are you using the 3 button if so you can use "mental ray approximation" to smooth at render times only there is a free tutorial on this site. ...............dave

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# 3 18-04-2013 , 09:01 PM

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Most definitely, using the '3' for smooth preview can really slow things down when the poly count starts climbing. Also you may need to delete history.

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# 4 19-04-2013 , 07:29 AM

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Turning off Two-Sided lighting will make a big difference in on screen performance especially if you are using geforce graphics.

See the image below - it is on the lighting tab just uncheck it

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# 5 19-04-2013 , 01:05 PM

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Well right now i would imagine it being the high poly count that makes everything so slow. Each lego brick has 8 cylinders, you should know if you've played with lego bricks before. But i have at least 500 to 600 lego bricks. Each lego brick is combined with their cylinders. Now I'm trying to take all of the bricks and combined them to shrink them down equally and properly. Like i said in my first post, each brick has a material which i believe could be slowing things down as well.
@ctbram; Two sided Lighting is already off.
@Gen; Where the History?
@daverave; Im not using the 3 button. Nor do i know what mental ray approximation is and does.
I tried using the 3 button but i get stuck again loading. I don't want to smooth anything because lego bricks have sharp edges. Also i want to animate this project so that each and every lego brick looks like they are raining down into their places, making the logo once every brick has fallen into their place.
Thank you guy's for the suggestion's!
Any more help will be appreciated!

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# 6 19-04-2013 , 03:21 PM

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well if it's just to improve user interface performance you could turn on interactive shading and set it to points or bounding box

That will make things a bit easier to manipulate

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# 7 19-04-2013 , 10:09 PM

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History is an account of all the operations you've run on the geometry(bevel, boolean etc) and sometimes it bogs things down. Select the objects and go to "Edit>Delete by Type> History" or the "Edit>Delete All by Type>History" if you don't want to constrain the action to whatever you have selected.

What are the specs of your machine?

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# 8 23-04-2013 , 02:12 PM

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# 9 23-04-2013 , 02:42 PM

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Interactive Shading -> points or bounding box

This will allow you to orient the camera without the geforce card having to move all the polys in the display.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

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# 10 23-04-2013 , 08:50 PM

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^I'd go with Rick's advice. The video card is low end, might as well try to keep it from constantly redrawing the scene.

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# 11 24-04-2013 , 01:49 PM

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Alright, ill try that. But where can i find it? Thanks for all of the advise! You guys helped a lot!

Last edited by foxco4; 24-04-2013 at 01:56 PM.

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# 12 24-04-2013 , 08:36 PM

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Check it on and hop into the options and chose a mode from the dropdown menu, be it points or whatever works.

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# 13 25-04-2013 , 01:21 PM

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Wel thank you you the help. I decided to just redo the project with less bricks. This has been a great lesson for me and will help me in the future. So thanks again for all of the help.

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# 14 25-04-2013 , 01:25 PM

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One last thing. I am now animating the project. I have the bricks moving. Moving from A to B it tends to speed up and then slow done to a stop. I want to change it so that it stays the same speed between both points. How can i edit the way it does that?

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# 15 25-04-2013 , 01:44 PM

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by default the graph editor is set to "ease in" and "ease out" so it accelerates at the start of the animation and decelerates at the end.

Go to the graph editor and change all the keyed frames from "ease in" / "ease out" to linear.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

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