Digital Art Zone

I have been running DS4 on Mac for some time with no real problems and easily handling 4-5 genesis figures in a relatively complex scene. Now in 4.5 and in the upgrades of it the application quits on trying to open almost any scene with 3 or more characters and a ‘normal’ suite of props, even if I substitute V4 for genesis to save size. Have I run out of processing and need to upgrade (in which case going from DS 4 to 4.5 was an expensive move) or is there a problem that can be solved? Can I rescue these scenes I can no longer open (one is annoyingly ready to render)
I am running Mac 2GHz Intel Core 17, 4GB 1333Mhz (hard drive way less than half full)

Which version of the Mac OS? Changes were made to DS to cope better with Lion, but they may have had a deleterious effect on older versions.

I am on 10.6.8 (snow leopard)

You may want to look at updating the OS - although Snow leopard is still officially OK people have had intermittent issues with it, as far as I am aware.

10.6.4 had a necessary video card upgrade which was beneficial to the DS interface stability.
The i7 2.0 GHz. was only available on the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini (2011), the logic board should allow you to upgrade to 16GB RAM, but the only one of these capable of running 10.6 is the Pro, therefore it came preloaded with 10.6.8 and you have these updates already (but you should check for system updates and run them anyway since it does a tremendous amount of background cleanup)

If you would like to expand the RAM, and it’s cheap right now if you can swing it you have two slots for PC 10600 SO-DIMM 204 Pin RAM running at 1333MHz.
http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades.cfm?model=433
8GB RAM (or more) is really going to open that system up noticeably with multiple figures in your projects.

With or without a RAM upgrade and assuming you’ve updated.
• Is your account the system administrator account? If not it should be for stability with DS.

• Have you repaired permissions from Macintosh HD:Applications:Utilities:Disk Utility (repair permissions)?

• Have you created another admin account and tired your sessions in that account to see if they don’t crash?

If the last one works you may have a corruption in your current user account
A reinstall might not hurt either, but reinstall in an admin account and immediately repair the drive permissions.
You can also use any Mac OS from 10.6.8 to the latest and greatest from Apple on any of those 3 i7 macs. I don’t know if DS works in 10.8.x but I think some users reported stability in 10.7. Upgrades for OS are again really inexpensive for Macs.

Thanks for all that info, it is really helpful.