I would like to see a new format for Maya binary (.MB) (Filename.MB64) This file format would be designed just for 64bit plat forms.  The reason for this would be to allow the user to save a file larger than 4 gb.  I am currently working on a project that uses several reference files.  The problem I am having is when I go to batch render, MentalRay will write a temporary file to the drive.  The temporary file contains all of the reference files merged into one file.  If the sum of these files is greater than 4gb Maya’s binary format will not allow the file to be created and Mentalray will fail.  I know that we can’t just eliminate 32bit version of Maya but, I do think that we need to develop a new file type that will allow maya to write a binary file larger than 4gb.  I am working on a workstation with 48gb of RAM and 12 solid 3.33 cores, I have always been impressed with how stable Maya is when utilizing systems resources.  I feel this 4gb file size limitation is very important and needs to be addressed.

RROCHS 25 March 2011 08:17 AM

I would like to see a new format for Maya binary (.MB) (Filename.MB64) This file format would be designed just for 64bit plat forms.  The reason for this would be to allow the user to save a file larger than 4 gb.  I am currently working on a project that uses several reference files.  The problem I am having is when I go to batch render, MentalRay will write a temporary file to the drive.  The temporary file contains all of the reference files merged into one file.  If the sum of these files is greater than 4gb Maya’s binary format will not allow the file to be created and Mentalray will fail.  I know that we can’t just eliminate 32bit version of Maya but, I do think that we need to develop a new file type that will allow maya to write a binary file larger than 4gb.  I am working on a workstation with 48gb of RAM and 12 solid 3.33 cores, I have always been impressed with how stable Maya is when utilizing systems resources.  I feel this 4gb file size limitation is very important and needs to be addressed.

The size of an individual file is not down to the architecture of the processor, but due to the nature of the FAT32 filesystem. Even though NTFS should be able to write files larger than 4gb some applications have trouble writing files larger than 4gb for some unknown reason.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/arti...ze-limits-on-ntfs-and-fat

Also i might be mistaken but ext2 suffers from this issue, although i doubt your running ext2 on a linux drive but also running maya. Apples HFS+ shouldnt suffer from this issue either. BTW there is no architecture information saved in a Maya file, as far as im aware it only contains vertex/animation/weight etc information, along with links to external files etc. The architecture of the machine/maya saving the file has no effect on the final file.