Maxwell Render

There has been a few posts earlier about Max crashing when opening the material editor. I am getting bitten quite badly by this right now, to the point where I can't really get any work done.

voltaire_ira said in a previous thread that he/she was able to solve this by deleteing "bad" geometry.

I have tried this approach, but I find the crashes not really related to any particular geometry at all. I can have a model that works for a while, and then starts crashing in the next session without any geometry even changed.

I also tried to isolate any bad geometry in a file that was crashing up to the point where I had deleted ALL geometry in the model, and it still crashed.

When I open the editor a few of the material preview slots are displayed before the crash, it seems more like the crash occurs as some particular material preview is about to be displayed.

This file, for example, contains nothing but a Maxwell Free Camera and still crashes repeatably on material editor open. I'm not shure if it is repeatable without all my materials on your local system, though. I'd be happy to put some time into generating a repeatable test case including the materials if any of the developers are interested.

What about the rest of you guys? Has anyone found any specific thing that causes the crash? If we can find something systematic then maybe we can work around it until someone from the NL team has time to look into this.

(I have also done a clean reinstall of Max version 7 SP 1 and the 1.1 plugin, but that changes nothing)

/j

This is the work around that I have found that works best for me...

1.) Open the scene (all dialog boxes should start out closed)
2.) Open the Render dialog box and save your settings
3.) Change the renderer to Default Scanline
4.) Open the material editor (everything should show up as black)
5.) Go back to the Render dialog box and reload your original settings
6.) All your materials should show up no problem and your rendering settings should be the exact same

I do this everytime it crashes and it fixes it for a long time until whatever bug causes it happens again. Yes it's annoying, but it only takes me a few seconds to fix. Let me know if it works for you.

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dual opterons 2.8ghz, 3gigs ram, 3ds max 7

One more info point: I was able to get the material editor to open by cleaning it using the BlurScript CleanMedit. At this point I added all the materials back to the slots by picking the from the Material Browser>Scene window. Max now works until I exit and reinvoke, but then crashes again. I then stared added the materials back to the editor one by one. With one of the materials I noticed the MXM file path info suddenly was lost. Then it crahsed again.

So I started the process over again: CleanMedit, and adding back from the scene. This time there was a crash in the middle of dragging a material from the Material Browser window to the Material Editor. This scenario was repeatable once, but the next round through I was able to add all materials back to the editor slots, save the file and bring it back up working.

In other words, I failed to find any systematic material or operation that causes the crash

I think it has something to do with problems retrieving the preview image, but not sure.

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http://www.ftella.com

I have this problem with when there is an MXM material in the ME that is missing a bitmap.
Your file doesn't crash when i open the ME BTW, probably as you said because I don't have your MXM's

J.

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http://www.joshuanewman.net

I agree that it is a problem with retrieving the bitmap. I have noticed that Maxwell is brutal with regards to finding or allowing you to change where the path is. Most or my material paths are too long to show up in the material editor, if upon opening it doesn't crash, so that I can go find the right mxm file. It is usually in the same place as the path said as well.

This really has to get fixed up in a hurry. Please NL!!!!

Thanks Peter

PS - in my rage I posted and then looked once and deleted my post after finding this thread!

Misterasset - Initially that had worked like a charm but then I had the same thing happen when I switched the material editor back to Maxwell from Scanline. When you reset your material Editor don't you lose all your render settings???

I will test with deleting the materials from my scanline material editor and see if that helps. I'll just keep deleting after I change it I guess if this persists. Man what a pain. I'll kee you posted!

Peter.

You can save your settings at the presets at the bottom of the render scene window. Just have to save your Maxwell preset and retreive it when you need it.

It happened to me too a crash when switching back to maxwell but most of the times works fine. I don't know for sure if it works but try to keep tidy the material editor: no empty mxm's, no standard materials with "None" as map, update previews (the texture used for preview) in mxm materials, make sure all the maps do exist and are reachable,... Sometimes I've fixed some no opening scenes by checking and updating mxm's recently used or changed.

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http://www.ftella.com

No. What is show in the slots there have nothing to do with the materials used in the scene. Max does this in a little peculiar way, I must agree. Putting a material in an editor slot makes it available for editing and assigning to objects. If it is removed from the slot, it is still in the scene.

I recommend the ClearMedit script. See here: http://www.neilblevins.com/blurscripts/blurscripts.htm

well you don't always need to use max's ME anyways, It's a bit of resource hog when using other renderers anyway.
This macroscript displays a dropdown box for assigning materials either from the current scene or from a library. might be useful. You will of course have to build your MXM's first

J.

http://scripts.joshuanewman.net/download/JNQuickMat.zip

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http://www.joshuanewman.net

JesperW - I was talking about losing the render settings, like time of day, minutes, location, tone, etc. As soon as you switch to scanline you lose your maxwell render settings. Also it seems that my materials go haywire if I open that file, when I delete my materials from the material editor, on a different computer.

Very frustrating!

Fernando - thanks for the tip - I'll look into that! Maxwell makes it extremely difficult to chekc the MXMs because they keep the default MAX material name when you put the MXM file in a slot -THAT'S JUST RIDICULOUS! Also you can't move to see the path so you don't know which material it is - AGAIN RIDICULOUS! Even when you do find the MXM files the maps inside them don't seem to be loaded properly even with the right path???? AGAIN VERY FRUSTRATING.

j_man - thanks but why doesn't NL just fix the way that Maxwell uses the Max material editor instead of US having to come up with constant time consuming work arounds!!! I'll take a look at that anyway.

Peter

Peter, in the Render dialog box for Max, at the very bottom (the actual box not the scrolling area) you'll see a drop-down menu for "Preset." If you click on that and click "Save Preset" you can save one called "maxwell_crash" or whatever. Then after you go to scanline, and the material editor is working again click "Preset" and click "Load Preset" and load in "maxwell_crash." All of your rendering settings come back the way they were.



I'm sure they are working to fix it. Juan has said many times that right now they are putting the majority of their effort into fixing the plug-ins. Until then it's up to us to find clever solutions. Cmon, it makes us all feel smarter when we figure out a work-around (if not a little fustrated).

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dual opterons 2.8ghz, 3gigs ram, 3ds max 7

I can't repeat this crash. I want to get it straight what you all are doing to produce it:

1. Open a scene that has Maxwell as the assigned renderer and mat. ed. renderer.

2. Open the material editor. If one of the materials in a slot is not found or the material is found, but is missing a bitmap, Max crashes.

or

3. Change the assigned renderer to scanline, then open the Max material editor. Max crashes.

I've tried to reproduce this every way I can think of on both my VIZ 2005 and VIZ 2007 licenses. No luck. I never had this happen with my Max 6 license, but that's temporarily out of order and I can't test it. I'm running OpenGL mode in both cases.

If this was a material or bitmap path issue, I should be able to reproduce it. Have you guys tried using a different display mode to see if it still happens? It could be a display driver issue. If you're using DirectX.x be sure you have the drivers recommended by the Max/VIZ installation guide. Max can be very funky where display drivers are concerned.

Frances -
I think it is only a problem with 1.1, which has only been released for Max 8 right??

My problem - open a scene setup with Maxwell materials, MXM files, ver 1.1, Max 8 Open GL. Open material editor, and it gives me an error and must close. that's it. I can do everything else but as soon as I open the material editor it crashes.

It is hard to pin down as it only happens to me on a couple of my projects.

Also it only seems to happen periodically within the project. Once it starts happening it continues and I cannot open the material editor without a crash, until I impliment one of the work arounds above. It does not seem to be limited to projects using bitmaps as I have a project that doesn't use any and it still happens, althouth I am using an ags material from NL files.

I might try a simple scene to see if I can duplicate. I could then send anyone the file to check. Thanks for the interest.

Peter.

I'm sure they will! all of these work arounds will be obselete soon and then we will have fun finding and helping NL to fix the new and undiscovered bugs.

J.

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http://www.joshuanewman.net