This is a scene I had working fine but then started to crash any time I turned on motion blur. It’s pretty simple, just regular sphere particles and some wind for turbulence. I tried turning off anything that might cause birth or deletion between frames but it still continued to crash. Then I noticed that the geometry updating status on the render dialog was listing event 1 as the pflow event that it was stuck on, which wasn’t even connected to the system I was trying to render at the time. If you open this scene, render a frame you should get a crash. Next if you delete event one and render again it should be fine. It’s as if vray or pflow is still connecting event one into the pf_burst system for some reason. I found with an earlier version of the same scene that if the second particle system in the scene was turned off, but some of the events in that system were on, again it caused vray to crash with it thinking that the second systems events were part of the first system.
No problems getting renders out now but it might be useful to figure out some other pflow issues?
Thanks for the scene, will look at it. In fact V-Ray has no way to know if and how the events are connected to a particle system - V-Ray only sees the events individually. Anyways, will try to figure something out.
That makes total sense as to why it’d cause a crash then. Still though, no issues with birthing / subframe stuff and with that bit of info about events there’s very little that can go wrong with it now!
As an update to this I’ve another scene that has a simple blood splat element and I was using the fast sss material ketchup presetto get some extra brightness in my element. The prepass caused a major crash which kills the scene every time.
Can you tell me which 3ds Max version you are using? We couldn’t really reproduce the issue here, neither with the scene that you provided in the first post, nor with our own setups.
Yep - max 2010 sp1, I’ll send you a scene across and hopefully it’ll show it. I found on another scene today I was having camera sampler issues causing a red error and stopping vray from rendering - it was a simple scene where originally I had one particle system for some blood elements but then I cloned the system into two similar systems so that I could get a multi matte for blood in front and behind an object. This started causing the red error and also a “null geometry” problem at times and it turned out to be the cloned particle flow system - everything rendered fine with that turned off. When I deleted the system to remake it clean from scratch, I noticed particle flow had made an event called “action recovery” with two operators in it. I’m not sure what events they were but it just seems that particle flow makes quite “dirty” objects - I don’t envy you having to debug it!
Just checked the file I sent up and it still crashes for me in the same way - I thought it might have been something to do with our file server being a bit wobbly but the same crash still happens with that scene. I’ll do a plugin / max reinstall and see is it still the same case after!
No, unfortunately the problem was resolved after the official versions were already done. As Alexander mentioned above, you can email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com for the fix.
I suspect that my messages might be diverted to dev/null as I have never had a reply from that address including this time.
I’d really like to get my hands on this fix.