crashing

[mskin]

hi.

 

Max keeps crashing on me. no reason given, "an error has occured and the application will now close..."

 

Circumstances are the same. i create a camera, attach it to a path constraint and then then select play toreview the animation. once i hit the play button, "kaboom".

 

could be memory? i only have 768 - but i thought that would just slow me down. could there be another issue?

 

it would be an disaster to have to rebuild the model.

 

here is another thing, there is a sweeped spline i want to edit. when i select the spline and then turn off the lightbulb next to the seep modifier, the entire spline obect becomes hidden. it doesn't show up again until i right click and select "unhide all"

[JamesTaylor]

it could be a memory issue, depends upon how heavy your model is, but its going to push your machine hard if you trying to view the animation in the viewport and have a large poly count.

 

That error message is a standard max error message, in my experience i've recieved it when i've run out of memory and its caused a crash. The easy way to test it is to switch off / hide sections of the model and then try to play the camera path, equally keep an eye on the processes in the task manager window - it'll indicate how much RAM each process is using, max will be one of them.

 

If its an issue with corrupt geometry you'll most likely find that its only one or two pieces not the whole model. Just a case of tracking them down! easiest way is to import the model into a new scene section by section, testing it after each import. When you find a section thatcauses it to crash you know its something you've just brought in, so go back and bring that section of stuff in bit by bit until you have your culpret.

[mskin]

thanks james.... ill start troubleshooting.

[studio2s]

When we upgraded to Max 9, we had that issue. I don't know which version you are using, but our problem was "solved" (really just patched) by adding more RAM. The scenes that caused this where usually radiosity scenes ( yes, some people in my office still use that)

[lecameleon]

Exactly Scott... That is one of the first questions I wanted to ask. Ok, if you are working in Max 9, then the very first suspect is the viewport rendering method. (Try this if you don't believe me). Switch to Open GL from DirectX. DirectX takes a horrendous amount of memory in Max9. Open the same scene in OpenGL-viewport-render method and things will be just fine.

By the way, this feature is precisely what gave Max 9 its vastly improved viewport speed. It comes at a cost though.. lots of memory needed for this. (And frankly, I am not too sure I like the OpenGl viewport look as compared to DirectX.. but oh well.. beggars can't be choosers LOL)..

[gfa2]

You can also turn Adaptive Degradation on by hitting the "O" key or choosing it from the View pull down menu. There are a bunch of options you can play around with under the Viewport Configuration.

 

For big scenes this can be really nice because if the scene is too much for you video card and PC to handle it will dummy down the scene to a more simple wireframe so you can still see what the camera motion is going to be like.

[denham]

You could try merging the model into a new scene, this has fixed crashes for me in the past.

[only3d]

also make sure u use the 'smooth' shading and not the wireframed one