I have been testing Anima 6 on our render farm, and I have noticed an issue with the Render plugin for 3ds max. When the render node plugin (Anima2.MAX.dli) is installed on one of the farm machines, jobs will start but they take FOREVER to start. I remove the plugin and start a job and it starts up quickly. Perhaps this is unique for my render farm, but this plugin is the one factor that is common for all the jobs I have been testing (that is correct, I have tested it on many jobs and even created some test renders with generic content). Anybody else notice this? Any thoughts>
Thanks for reporting this.
Is this issue still happening when using the latest version of Anima? (6.1.0)
I have the 6.1 rendernode plugin in place and these are no longer stalling all render jobs, just Anima jobs. We are using Deadline 10.4.1.6 with 3ds max 2025.3 and V-Ray 7.10. I have manually opened a render job that uses Anima on one of the render nodes, and the job loads in a user session and will render as well using the rendernode plugin, however, if you try to run the same job file through Deadline, the rendernode starts up, but nothing happens (stalls). I have waited over an hour for the job to start and it finally failed due to the timeout limits I set in Deadline. I tried to swap out the rendernode plugin with the workstation plugin, and the job fails immediately. I switch back to the rendernode plugin and the job runs but nothing happens.
I have some more testing results. I found that if you run the Deadline Client in a user session as opposed to a service, Anima will render using the rendernode plugin. This is NOT ideal for our workflow as it is not practical to manually log into 60 machines, nor is this permitted by our security team to allow autologin scripts. So, I have a solution that is possible in a pinch, but I really need a permanent solution. The previous 5.6.1 plugin seemed to work.
I submitted a support ticket on this matter.
I want to attach to this.
I tested Anima 6.1.0 today and we ran into exactly the same issue.
Network rendering to a Deadline client that has Deadline client installed as NOT service, renders fine. But when rendering on Deadline Service client, it just hangs on ‘Starting 3ds Max…’
Since I have 45 rendernodes and 30 workstations, and security is at a premium, I can’t have all of them autologin into a user environment. So Deadline is installed as service everywhere.
Hope to get an update soon, but looks like all Anima forum posts go unanswered 
so it probably be a while =(
Hello @albert_alomar ,
It would seem we have another similar Anima 6 with Deadline issue. I am curious if this happens with Backburner as a Service? Anybody using Backburner but using the service instead of the manually launch in-session client?
Hello @bf_software @WSP_ProjectViz
We are currently focused on the next Anima update (6.1.1), which includes important bug fixes and support for UE 5.6.0, it will be released very soon.
After that, we will be able to test this case, debug it in detail, and understand why the plugin is not working when executed as a service.
Thanks in advance for your patience.
Thanks, Albert. I hope to see a fix sooner than later as we cannot implement Anima 6.x without our render farm.
We are having the exact same issue with Anima 6.1.0. We work with 3ds Max and Backburner and the backburner jobs don’t start due to the rendernode anima installations. So this whole issues renders the rendernode installation useless.
it would be good if this got fixed quickly as we rely on our render nodes to render an animation with anima. I don’t know any way to solve this.
@Drawehn the only solution right now is to roll back to 5.x untill they release an update that fixes this.
It’s really frustrating. It hasn’t worked for 4 months since the release of anima 6. Everyone has paid 200€ for one license (4 months) in that time and it’s not working.
Pavel, did you open a support ticket with Chaos? Because I think the more people open support tickets for that problem, the quicker they are going to solve it. I opened one now but it took a while for them to realize the problem isn’t at our end…
Hi everybody,
To follow up on this topic, I just want to reiterate that we have not yet resolved this issue because we were forced to prioritize other issues in previous updates that affected a larger number of users.
That said, we confirm that we are aware of the issue and we also have been able to reproduce it in our testing environment. It appears whenever the DCC host application of the Anima plugin (3dsMax or Cinema4D) is running on a system account, which happens whenever the main process (3dsmax.exe or Cinema4D.exe) is started by a service (a Deadline worker, backburner server, DR spawner).
We plan to include a fix for this in the next Anima update (6.2.0). For now, the only workaround available in Anima 6 is to avoid running Max or C4D as a service.
Please also check for compatibility with Pulze RenderFlow worker/DR while you’re in the process of fixing this issue.
It goes without saying that development on Anima needs to speed up significantly, and new major release versions should not be going out in this state going forward. This shouldn’t be an issue now, with Chaos behind you.
Hi @alexyork
Please also check for compatibility with Pulze RenderFlow worker/DR while you’re in the process of fixing this issue.
Once the “service” execution problem solved, it should work fine in all cases, including Pulze too.
It goes without saying that development on Anima needs to speed up significantly, and new major release versions should not be going out in this state going forward. This shouldn’t be an issue now, with Chaos behind you.
Thanks for your feedback. However, we honestly think that the development pace on the Anima product is quite high already. Since version 6 was released only 3 months ago, we have already released 4 updates with a significant number of fixes and improvements. Currently, no other Chaos product has this launch rate, so Anima is actually raising the bar on this particular aspect.
That said, we always strive to keep improving in all aspects, including this one.
When a company releases a totally unusable, untested-in-a-real-environment product and then sweats to panic-release multiple patches just to get it off the ground, and when it’s still not actually properly functioning in some important ways, I wouldn’t call that “raising the bar” by any stretch of the imagination. Truly, that’s given me a good Friday chuckle!!!
I deeply hope you can get Anima in a good place, and soon. There’s no viable competition out there for it right now, which of course is fantastic for you guys/Chaos, but not for us as customers. At best it’s an extremely useful but desperately buggy, clunky, slow, frustrating software, and at worst it’s completely unusable. That’s not a good place to be.
All visualizations requiring 3D animated people are now being created without Anima since this has been an issue for several months now…this was not what I was expecting with a major release…
With all due respect to everyone’s opinions, please bear in mind that scenes with Anima content render without issues when the DCC app (3ds Max or Cinema 4D) is not running as a service. Using Deadline workers, Backburner servers, Pulze nodes or Team Render Clients as a service is optional. In fact, the “service” option is never used in the default installation on any of the mentioned Render Managers.
We understand that some users prefer using render workers as a service, and we recognise that the Anima issue reported in this thread is a significant inconvenience in those cases. In this regard, we would like to reiterate that we have identified the root cause of the problem and are making good progress in providing a permanent and reliable solution.
It is taking time to solve because the issue was introduced by the new viewport engine that has been used in Anima since version 6. The new viewport system is much more powerful than the previous one, offering superior performance and features. However, it required us to rewrite many core parts of Anima from scratch because they depended on the older viewport system that we used since version 2, which has become obsolete over time. We have now detected that some viewport core modules are being loaded in the plugin, and Windows has problems initializing some of those libraries when running under the restrictions of a “service” process.
The Anima Dev Team is working to make the necessary changes to prevent the plugin from loading those conflicting libraries. The good news is that these changes will make the plugin load faster and use less memory. However, this is a complex modification, and complex modifications take longer. Nevertheless, we are on track to include this fix in the next update.