Poof

[glorybound]

I know I am not alone with MAX closing without warning "poof". I can understand a rendering taking a long time, but I can't understand the application closing without warning. This happens to be on most projects and it costs me hours a week. What is up with this and how do you avoid it? I know about proxies, reference files, and system settings, but all these should help you avoid long render times and not closing applications without warning.

I have a 2-dual cores with 8GB of ram so we are not talking about a wimpy workstation. I am not rendering at high resolution and my settings are pretty much default. I am working on a scene now and I am trying to render it out at 1536 X 1167. I am using IR and LC on medium default settings. It'll process light cache (LC) for about 1/2 hr and MAX will "poof", close!

[MoonDoggie]

Material/Memory related

[glorybound]

Material

I give vray 1800MB on auto and all my materials are custom made. Are you thinking texture map size? I do have some pretty hi-res texture maps? Maybe MAX's pager?

[MoonDoggie]

The only kind of problems I've had with Light Cache are material/memory related. Check for an architectural material/raytrace etc, but if it's getting halfway done it would seem it's memory related, usually material bugs crash almost immediately on LC.

[ruud3dv]

You've got 8Gb, so you could try setting memory limit to about 6Gb. This will definitely help if you're using a lot of displacement.

[gilpo]

I've never had luck with the 'Auto' setting on the dynamic memory. Every time I've tried to render a high-poly scene with it 'poof'. I use the 'dynamic' setting for everything but small scenes. Even though it's slower, it's been more reliable for us.

I've gotten a lot of crashes lately with the material editor. I'm running Vista sp1 Utimate x64 with Max 2008 x64. When I have too many slots active, I get those 'poof' crashes frequently.

[vlado]

Which V-Ray version is that?

Best regards,
Vlado

[glorybound]

v-ray 1.5 SP2

I am running v-ray 1.5 SP2

[gilpo]

Which V-Ray version is that?

Best regards,
Vlado

Not sure who you're addressing, Vlado, but I'm still on SP1.

[giancarlo_007]

i've had problems like that in the past and it seemed to revolve around the displacement map. when i checked the displacement setting "off" in the global settings tab, it rendered fine.

[ingo]

Hi
Are you suing the "Link Manager" by any chance. I can't us it anymore because max is crashing all the time with it.

Ingo

[glorybound]

Link Manager

I am not using the link manager

[pailhead]

I've had similar problems quite recently when i was trying to collect all the textures from one scene using the bitmap/photmetric browser thing. I think max would crash either when i select all maps, or when i try to copy them into another location.


My auto save is always set to 3 minutes or so, so i can always have somewhere to go back to once it fails. I also save files quite often, but i always use the plus thing, so i end up with tens, even hundreds of files depending on how long a project takes.