Free Memory is Low

[wschil20]

If you see an error like this:
Free memory is low. Memory exception thrown.
Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library runtime error for C:\program files\autodesk\maya2009\bin\maya.exe

This happens most often in windows.
Maya running out of memory can be caused by various things. To get your scene working, open open Maya on Linux and try opening your scene there. Maya in Linux has up to 8GB or RAM available to it, whereas windows only has a maximum of 2GB, sometimes opening a scene causes too many resources to be loaded simultaneously.

If you have hardware texturing enabled, your hypershade open, or large assets visible, hide them. Save you scene as a new version then try opening it on windows again.

When re-saving your scene, try disabling hardware texturing or closing your hypershade before saving, that way Maya wont try to initialize them when you reopen your scene.

I've worked with scenes before that use several 4K and 2K textures and using hardware texturing in Windows will immediately crash Maya. To avoid crashing, try hiding everything in your scene and unhiding your objects one by one. That way Maya does not try to cache textures for your entire scene at once.


Obviously there are a lot of reasons Maya can throw that error. If it occurs while rendering try this:
---If you have depthmap shadows, degrease the resolution
---If you are using raytraced shadows, lower the samples, or avoid ray tracing altogether.
---If you are using final gather, reduce the density, accuracy, or anything else. Same applies for Photons/GI.

Try troubleshooting the problem, and if you're still having crashes, come talk to us at the Systems Office of schedule a tutoring session on MySCAD.