Hello,

The issue is: when I use dynamics on my workstation it lags significantly when It works fine on my laptop. My workstation has these specs:

AMD Opteron quad-core 2347
8gb RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 4600
window vista os

Now, what confuses me is that when I check my task manager, only about 11% of my cpu is used and maybe 2gigs of my RAM at most so I am no where close to using all my computer’s resources, so why is it lagging at all. I know some people might suggest that its because of vista and all its errors… but I am using vista on my laptop as well in which the dynamics work fine.

I would appreciate any suggestions that any one might have.

Thank you.

try with 64bit vista. more than 2gb ram u can utilise

I do have 64bit vista, to be honest, I assume the problems stems from the multiple computers that I have used on this file; due to the fact that files that I create purely on this computer with many more particles and calculations work perfectly.

you know, I have a simillar problem, and I think you and I are suffereing from the same issues.  I have a dual core, 4 gigs ram, windows XP machine at work, and I cannot get a VERY simple dynamics simulation to run.  I make a wall out of cubes, and even using only 7 or 8 cubes plus default air field on it, my playback will grind to a halt.  It makes absolutely no sense to me.  I swear I’ve used dynamics in school before and it worked just fine, but now it’s completely non functional.  I wrote the Maya team about 2 months ago and never got a reply, nor did I ever get one on here.  I don’t mean to hijack your thread; I just wanted to state that this is a legitimate problem that’s not just affecting you, and I’m wondering if it isn’t some kind of bug?

I’ll keep desperately seeknig a solution, and if anything comes up I’ll gladly post here. Hopefully someone else will drop some feedback on this issue!

well, its possible. but, as i stated I can get extremely large dynamic simulations to work. simulations using hundreds of thousands of particles and what not. this was actually an isolated event in which I was working on a scene with a 32bit machine only and when I opened the file on my workstation, after I had already finished the scene for the most part on the other machine, it simply would not work with the dynamics; it would freeze. I could turn the dynamics off and the rest of the animation run perfectly. so, my belief is it was an issue of working between dramatically different machines because I could create the same exact simulation on my workstation and it would work fine, but that scene, when moving from my laptop to my workstation it simply didn’t work.

btw, for your issue, if u are making a wall out of cubes, make sure there is some space in between the cubes otherwise interpenetration will occur between the cubes causing it to stop. there are other things that could cause that, but thats one of the most common mistakes I see.

I don’t understand what just happened.  In between when I wrote my previous reply and now, maya’s running the simulation I mentioned above perfectly.  I do believe I had spacing in between the bricks before as well, but yeah.  works great now.  No idea why.  Maybe my computer’s just possessed.  But it will no doubt not function for me when I need it again next.