Environment Re-edit...

Encountered multiple problems through the importation of the flowers which were morphed using blended shapes.

Dreamworld Final

Our final look for the Dreamworld. 

All the objects in grey have their textures turned off because the scene would lag majorly if they were on. This was the biggest problem we encountered. After Jitesh helped me import the flowers, I reordered them into our scene and made sure they were visually appealing for all our appropriate camera shots. As I turned on the textures the computer froze.

Dreamworld Wireframe

We had to revert to working in wireframe mode as to try and reduce the computers processing time while we animate but because all the flowers have already been animated with blend shapes there was still a bit of lag. This was also due to having all the multiple blend shapes within the scene. We tried to delete all the blend shapes but that just messed up the animations of the flowers.

Dreamworld Bounding Box

So we tried putting everything in Bounding Box mode as to fully reduce processing time which allowed the computer to run fine. But it would be very difficult to animate in this mode because you wouldn't be able to visualize anything animated.

Flower Blend Shape Groups

This is just half of the blend shapes of the flowers that we have in our Dreamworld environment.

Flower Blend Shape Army

These are all the blend shapes for the flowers. There were just too many shapes that I couldn't separate them all so I just left them overlapping each other. They were hidden off camera anyway. This probably was the biggest contributor to crashing Maya several times. But they were necessary to be there for our flower morphs to work.

With help from Jitesh and immense help from our tutor Raj we came up with a solution after trying all the options above. So I just went through all the individual shot layouts and deleted everything that wouldn't be seen within the shot. Went into the outliner and deleted objects at a time, even entire groups. Most annoyingly the blend shapes that weren't needed for any animation in certain scenes. Deleted all unused layers and unused texture nodes from the Hypershade. This was was extremely daunting but highly rewarding as our scenes no longer lag or freeze with the textures on.