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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.