Max Autosave while starting render -> freeze

Hi there,

as I didn’t find it in the known crash issues, I wanted to ask if someone else had this problem, too.

It happens about every 4 days to me, I am klicking “render” and the v-ray frame buffer and
the render dialogue start but nothing happens. I can move the windows, but no bucket is
being rendered and I also cannot abort rendering.
This only happens when max seems to do an autosave (which can be seen at the bottom of max).

I have had this problem with max 2009-2012 and v-ray 1.x-2.x.

Is there a solution what I could to apart from deactivating autosave?
At the moment I need to shut down max with the task manager, no other way to go on.

thanks
Bruno

Happens here too, max 2010. Every now and then when the stars align and you render at the same time as an autosave it crashes. And in extreme cases eats/deletes your .max file which is the worst. Seems the best solution is to unfortunately turn down autosave frequency and get in the habit of saving versions yourself often.

V-Ray specifically disables auto-save at the start of the render, but something in 3ds Max goes behind its back and enables it again. The guys at Autodesk suggested that it may be related to something in the particular scene, so it would be very helpful if someone can get us a scene that exhibits this behavior.

Best regards,
Vlado

Hi Vlado,

here is the archive with the max-2012-file where it happened yesterday. As it does not happen very often I don’t remember other scenes I could send.
The scene is quite simple, it’s a wip scene, some rigged birds flying around in general.

Bruno

I have another question but it’s also saving related.
the vraylog makes a note at the beginning and saves the scene before it starts rendering. but it doesn’t save the scene on its original place, because if max crashes and you open the last state of the scene the changes you made before rendering are lost.
what is vray saving and what’s the path of the saved scene? it would be good to know for backup.

best regards
themaxxer

I have had this problem and I have even posted in the forum about it in the past. As far as I can tell it happens regardless of the max scene file. I have it happen on a variety of scenes with varying degrees of complexity. also the autosave file that is saved during this is incomplete and not loadable. its always just a couple of megs from being completed.

V Miller

I’ve found that the problem happens less when I switched from lightcache to brute force. Very strange…

well…we actually had to write a custom autosave feature for the entire 3d dep, which was really not an autosave but a prompt dialogue that came up every so minutes and user had to click weather to save, or snooze. After talking to most of the artists I realized that majority of them had autosave disabled for various reasons. So we ended up writing this instead.

that’s a great solution and not at all hard to implement I imagine. I’ve been burned quite a few times by this particular issue but I loves me autosave!

V Miller

related issue?

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?40244-repeatable-save-corruption

still in vray 3.0 this annoying problem persists!!!

seven years and it’s still happening!!!

would it be possible for vray to check if there’s an autosave happening on clicking render before it tries to start rendering?

Is the script to prompt an autosave freely available?

why not just turn off autosave and ctrl+s all the time?

if autosave is on at least it’s only 15 minutes of work lost rather than potentially half a day if the file corrupts for any reason…

I get this happening way too often. Also just happened now when trying to just make a new material. Soooo frustrating. I have to force crash max about ever 15 minutes when using RT.

Have you tried to reduce the V-Ray RT performance by dropping the Ray Bundle Size and Rays Per Pixel parameters?
Which type of engine you are using?
Does it happen on every scene?

For me I notice the autosave freeze when using BF/LC with the Ray Bundle Size at 16. It also happens when I merge objects into a scene that has RT running but this could be an unavoidable freeze…

I’ve just tested to merge object into a scene when V-Ray RT is working in both CPU and GPU engines but it was worked fine - could be a scene dependent.
Have you got a reproducible scene or the issue appears randomly?

According to the BF/LC rendering - are you rendering with V-Ray RT or with V-Ray Adv with Progressive Image Sampler?

Disregard this, my information was incorrect anyway.

Regarding the merge-freezes, it’s working on my current scene but I’ll try to find one that doesn’t work.

I think the light I was trying to merge that was causing the crash has become corrupt. It doesn’t show up in the viewport and behaves very strangely…