After Installing Vray on Max 2022, Max crash on material editor.

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max Issues
1

Hello everyone,

We just updated our machines to Max 2022, it work just fine, but after install the latest Vray, if we open the material editor Max crash.. the only solution that work for us is unistall Vray, and it goes to the normal behavior, does anyone experienced the same? and in case, is there any solution?

Thanks in advance,

Best,

2

Hey @fc_tirado ,

Are you experiencing such issues even with earlier versions? Have you tried resetting 3ds max’s settings to their defaults by deleting the ENU folder?

Upon crashing, there should be a minidump file located in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp, can you please forward it via our contact form? Make sure to mention this thread in the email, thanks!
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3

Hi All,

I am having the same problem with 3dmax 2019.

Was working fine with Vray 5 Update Build 5.10.03

I updated to Vray 5.20, and now it crashes every time I open the material editor.

Can render and do everything. just opening the material editor crashes max.

Please help :frowning:

4

Tried to delete ENU folder. Still crashed when opening material editor.

I have the crash dump but it is 12mb too big to be attached here.

5

Hello, GeorgeSafiArch.

Please send it to us via our contact form, as Nikoleta mentioned above.

Thanks in advance.

6

Thank you,

I submitted a ticket.

Just to give some help to the user above while we try to figure this out.

1. Deleting the ENU did nothing to fix the scene that wasn’t working

2. I opened a fresh file that I use to start all my projects and the material editor worked fine in there. So I copied everything from the crashing file to the new file and saved it and it is working fine after multiple opens of the file itself and the material editor.

3. I opened another unrelated old project and that project worked as well.

4. The file that was crashing is still crashing. So I am not sure if somehow the first file you open after installing Vray 5.2 is somehow becoming corrupt.

Hope this helps for now.

Thanks to the support people for all your help!

7

Well, could the file have been corrupt before 5.2 was installed, and it wasn’t noticed?
If you open the corrupt file with the old V-Ray, does it work fine?

8

I was working in the file (that later developed the issue).

I checked my phone to procrastinate, and saw an article about Update 5.2 on my news feed.

I got excited and went to download it so that maybe I could play with the new features on the project (that later had the problem). I know Vray is so quick and easy to update I would be working again in 20 minutes.

I downloaded Vray 5.2 . I closed my project. Updated to Vray 5.2. Everything successful in the installer.

Opened that same project that was working fine 20 minutes ago, looked around did some testing of a render to see what was new in VFB. All fine. Then opened material editor (I use classic material editor) and before all the balls fully loaded got the Max crash notification.

Repeated it a few times to make sure. The editor outline and menu shows up and then a few of the balls load, then Max hangs and proceeds to cash after.

The crash of Max is also a VERY hard crash, usually if my max crashes it is very quick to remove itself from the screen. When Max crashed because of this issue, the program itself took a while to end and also my mouse disappeared when over the max window.

So maybe it could be a graphical issue?

Sorry for the long message, just once again want to give as much info as possible

As of today everything seems to be working fine for several projects that I have opened up and also the project that I copied everything into from the affected file.

Because everything is working fine I have not rolled back to the previous version as unfortunately I am on a deadline at the moment so I cannot test this.

Thanks again for all the help and excellent support.

9

It’s gold to have a detailed recollection of the process that led to the crash.
From our side, oftentimes things aren’t obvious from looking at files, or crash dumps, or code alone.

Thank you for the excellent report! :slight_smile:

10

We have exactly the same problem as described above. After installing 5.2 max crashes. Just re-installed vray 5.13 and try to open an new file that was used in 5.2 and max crashes. Merged the new 5.2 file into a new scene with 5.13 and everything is working fine. Looks like a kinda of interface problem…

11

It could be something with the Qt UIs, who knows.
I’ve alerted the devs, thanks for the reports!

12

I have the same issue in 5.2 with a file that works fine in 5.13.
When I open the compact material editor it crashes almost instantly, when I open the slate material editor I can scroll around a bit until I trigger something that I think could be loading of a bitmap or rendering of a material preview.

13

Slate defers any UI rebuild for when one double clicks a node, while the compact will draw one UI the second it’s opened.

14

Hi All,

I am having the same problem with 3dmax 2020.

Was working fine with Vray 5 Update Build 5.10.04

15

So far, the provided crash dump shows that the reason is Normal Bump maps used in the shaders. Those maps are well known trouble makers, so it will be best to avoid them (use VRayNormalMap). You can use the V-Ray scene converter (RMB in the Viewport) to do that automatically.

If for some reason you want to keep them as Normal Bump maps, the second workaround is to roll back to Native 3ds Max swatches (Render Setup/Settings/System).

16

I can confirm that the second workaround works for me (roll back to native swatches). I have not yet tried converting to VrayNormalBump.

Thanks for a really quick response!

17

Count me in. Pretty much what everyone said…

18

Hello,

The crash with the unsupported NormalBump map is fixed in the stable nightly builds starting from build number 31077 (Chaos).
To mention it again - NormalBump should be avoided and it is better to convert it to the VRayNormalMap map.

Best regards,
Yavor

19

Same thing happened to me after installing V-ray 5.2 in max 2021. I have alot of old files that uses the normalbump node, so while I’ll try to avoid it in the future, it would be nice with a fix. I’ll check out the nightly build.
Btw, is there a tool or script for converting normal bump to vray normalmap in the same manner as converting Bitmaps to VrayBitmap? I was hoping to find one, but couldn’t.
[edit-2] I just found out the V-ray scene converter fixes this, but it isn’t explicitly mentioned when running the script. :slight_smile:

20

Indeed, we should perhaps make obvious what kind of things get converted.
EDIT: i was made aware we *do* have one such help page, here.

And also, perhaps, prepare a batch converter to point at a set of folders (this could however be trouble, as older max version files would be upgraded to the version tehy’re converted with. Thoughts?).