Recovering a max file from the autosave/rendering bug

[Neilg]

Theres a really upsetting bug in max where if it tries to autosave at the second a render starts (may only be in 2011) then it neither saves or renders, and the render cant be cancelled - leaving you sat looking at what was a perfectly fine and working scene with no option but to loose it.
It mostly comes up when tweaking materials too, which makes getting it back to where it was incredibly annoying.

Anyone know if it's possible to recover from this? Despite my autosaves being set up for every 5 minutes, my last one is over an hour ago and the most current one is 0kb and locking up max.

[Morbid Angel]

we reported this bug a while ago, its not easy to fix, besides turning off autosave. We actually compared the file that it autosaved and failed with the one which was saved right before it crashed and it was maybe 70 mb from 85 mb, so it actually does not finish writing. I remember a friend of mine write a script that would autosave before render, so when you clicked render it would save, thus avoiding this problem, but it may be quite annoying to try to save each time before render. What we had to do on my last 3ds max production was disable native 3ds max autosave and implement a custom one which would prompt user to save with a ui, rather then silently.

[Neilg]

The one I had then was 120kb... barely even started.
There is someone here who could probably help with that user prompt script for me, that's a really good idea. I'm at the part of this job where i'm doing constant quick region renders every minute for some fine tweaking... an autosave before each one would kill me!

I've already encountered this twice in the last few days, I guess the more you render the more likley you hit it.

[Fikret]

I'm also annoyed by this autosave bug which resulted in more crashes and corrupted scenes than turning the autosave function off (and which I finally did )
I just came across a maxscript command to check if a autoback process is just running: autosave.isactive()
So I'm wondering if this could not be used as a pre-render script to stop starting a render if an autosave is currently running. Unfortunatrely I don't know maxscript well enough to check if this could work

[flino2004]

I never had that problem, maybe because I use xrefs, so the file where I render the images from is very small. It has only cameras and lights..... I like to use xrefs for that reason too, it's very difficult to lose information that way..... On the other hand you could save it as another file and merging all the files.

[flino2004]

You could try to merge the file into another one ... In some cases works, at least you have list of the objects that you could recover.

Fernando

[Neilg]

It has only cameras and lights.....

Doesnt do much good when you're at the tweaking materials stage - any one material in my scene and for each view i'll do a huge number of tiny regions and adjustments to get them looking as good as possible. Opening an xref and saving it every time because you changed glossies from .8 to .77 isnt really worth it.

[flino2004]

if you want to work on one of the files...you could xref the other ones (overlay) and tweaking as much as you want and rendered from them.....in my workflow works great and I never had problems losing information.
the other benefit to work that way is if you work using BB and you don't change cameras and lights but you changed the model.... you don't need to go in max to send the renderings again to your farm.
of course it's a preference but I save a lot problems to myself in that way.