3dsmax 8 sp3 - 1.47.03 - bugs

[Adam H. Stewart]

This is a bit of a stab in the dark, but I am having lots of crashes with 3dsmax 8 sp3 and Vray 1.47.03 on my home rig. I thought it might be the ram on my new machine as I was getting dynamic link library errors so I swapped that out, but I am still getting the crashes. They are very random and have happened across multiple scene's but all using vray and mostly when I got to render, using GI - the same scene's rendered fine in work using 7.5 with 1.47.03 so I am wondering if it is an issue with 3dsmax 8 ?.
Obviously I'm not giving enough indepth information for an truely educated answer, but if somebody is using the same combination of max and vray with no general problems, then I can know I need to dig a bit deeper to find the cause, I was hoping it dould be easy - yeh right

Thanks as always for your help

[jacksc02]

Hey Adam,
Why dont you upgrade to 1.5?

[DaForce]

Adam what are the errors when max crashes?
Anything showing up in the Windows Event Log.

Instead of swapping out the ram you probabaly should have run memtest86 first.. that way you would know if it was ram or not. Might still be a good idea.

And yeah.. why not upgrade to 1.5

[Adam H. Stewart]

Mem test showed errors

I did the memory test first, it took bloody ages - it showed up errors. The guys at bell computers where great and sent out new ram when I sent them the error log. There was no particular error log message. 3dsmax just goes down leaving me starting at the report the problem to autodesk info screen.

I was putting off the upgrade merely because it will take a couple of days to the get the license key back and I always seem to be in the middle of a project so can't afford the wait time. I will do it next week for sure, hopefully that will cure it.

Thanks as always for your help.

[DaForce]

Ah right. Cool.
I assume you ran it after installing the new RAM, and it came up with no errors?

Does it only happen when rendering? Is it repeatable.. like it will crash halfway thru the LC calc everytime.. or is it totally random?
Whats the memory usage for 3dsmax.exe at the time of the crash?

With 1.5 RC3 you can install it and choose software licence that will continue to use your existing licence AFAIK.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Excellent

Thanks a mllion for the tip on the upgrade. I was under the impression that I would have to wait for a license from Chaos. I have 1.5 on now and am ready to rock.

The crashes mainly happened straight when I hit render. I first notice the problem when I brought a scene I was working on at work home and it just refused to render at full res. The problem also came up when I was rendering an animated sequence, the still rendered fine but when I put on the animated sequence it would render fine for about 20 frames and then go belly up. It rendered fine at a lower res. I work with it today using 1.5 and report back.

Thanks again for all your help.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Error continues

I just got another crash, same as before, this time I wasn't even using GI. I saved the info from the .XML file - but is does not have any information that can help me. It seems to be the only file from the system dump that I could save.

As with the other errors I am sure that I can render the same scene again with no problems. At the moment the license I am using for 3dsmax 8 is exported from an unused machine in work - could this have anything to do with max instability ?

Thanks as always for your help.

[jacksc02]

adam, email me the vraylog.txt and i will see what the issue is

[DaForce]

Hmmmm well the vraylog might show something but if max is just disappearing its unlikely there will be anything in the logs.

Can you confirm that you have run memtest after installing the new memory.. and was it error free?
Does it crash on simple scenes? or is it only on the more complex ones.
I would (as I mentioned earlier) check the memory usage of max as it crashes just to rule out that max is hitting windows max memory limit.

[Adam H. Stewart]

memtest

I'll re-run the memtest on the new ram tonight and tomorrow, it takes a really long time to go through the 4 gigs.

I was using a huge HDRI 6000x3000 and have cut that down and haven't had any crashes since then.

All the scene's that where crashing where pretty complicate, I kept an eye on the ram usage and is doesn't seem to get much higher then 526mb.

It is a truely random crash, there does not seem to be any pattern other then it is when vray starts to render a view.

I'll update when I've tested the ram.


Thanks as always

[Adam H. Stewart]

No crashes with smaller HDRI

A quick update - since I changed to the lower res HDRI I haven't had any crashes - touch wood.

Thanks for all your help

[jacksc02]

nice one, im glad it was something simple like that