STEP BY STEP

TOP TIPS FOR AVOIDING CRASHES IN MAYA

01 AUTOSAVE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND

This may be an obvious tip, but make sure you enable the Autosave feature. Inside the Maya preferences window you will find the Files/projects section. Enable Autosave and set the Interval (minutes) option to five, although you may want to space out the saves if you are working on a larger file.

I would also limit the number of saves too so you don’t clog up your hard drive space, and also put them in a specific folder so they are easier to find if needed.

02 TURN OFF VIEWPORT 2.0 FEATURES

Some of the time, a crash is caused by a display issue. Maybe the scene is too complicated, or your graphics card is an older model. Try disabling features like ambient occlusion and antialiasing and see if that helps. Also, turning off textures

and switching to a default light could reduce the strain on the display.

03 IMPORTING INSTEAD OF LOADING

If you are having trouble loading a scene, try importing it instead. This will bring it in without some of the baggage that is sometimes stored on the file. If this fails, try importing again but make sure the view is set to wireframe, again it may be a display issue causing the problem.

04 GO BACK IN TIME

If the file won’t load, or the scene won’t work in the current version of Maya, try using it in an older version. Just one version behind though, to be safe. So, if for example it’s not working in 2020, see if it will work in 2019 for example.

If it does, you could save or even export the contents and reload them back into the current version to see if that helps.