3ds Max 9 crashes constantly!

[archkre]

My 3ds Max 9 crashes constantly when I am either modeling or rendering. First it used to give me a message before crashing "The application now close, do you want to save your changes?" but now the software instantly closes without warning. It sometimes crashes when I switch from wireframe view to shaded with highlights view which it gives me the indication that there is also a video-card problem. It also crashes at the end of Final Gather when I am using mental ray to render. It gets to 100% of FG and then it crashes. Now I use V-ray but the problem persists. If anyone know of some settings that can help avoid the constant crashing. The models I use are relatively light with no funny textures, everything straight forward. My system is a dual core XEON 3.7 GHZ with 3 gb RAM .

 

Thank you

[manta]

I second that...

is there any scene you can post that we can try out, to see if it happens to us ?

Because I have had zero problems with it...

[SandmanNinja]

You can rename your max folder (Max-old is a good descriptive name) and re-install Max and then apply SP2. No extra plug-ins - just plain vanilla max.

 

Do a new simple, clean scene FRESH (i.e. don't load your old scene) with a typical light set up that you feel would crash your old max.

 

Then start loading in old scene files.

 

If it continues to crash with the OLD files (but not new ones), I'd say the file is corrupt.

 

If max continues to crash with new, fresh, newly-created files, then it's either Max or the computer hardware.

 

You can ask other users to try running your file to see how it behaves on their computer. If it crashes there, then it's a corrupt file.

 

There are freeware memory and system testing programs that will write values to memory locations, and then read the same value back and compare it to see if the value read back is the same as the value written to the specific memory location. (I use to write these boring utilities in another life) If the value read back isn't the same as the value written, then the memory address is unstable and the memory chip is suspect.

 

It never hurts to:

1) run a spyware checker (I use Ad-Aware) and get rid of all the little bugs

2) run virus checker (I user Norton)

3) del TEMP files

4) update all drivers (especially video)

5) run scandisk

6) run defrag (this might take a while)

 

Hope you get the problem solved.

[batteryoperatedlettuce]

If it's persistantly crashing when changing view ports I'd say that a part of your problem could well be graphics card related. When I first put my machine together, max was managing to crash the whole computer. Totally blue screened and died all the time. I had someone look at the card and the problem is now solved.

 

Vray 1.47 used to kill max all the time when making the light cache 2ndary pass. 1.5 seems to have no problem at all, so I guess they fixed something.

 

I've never had issues with mental ray apart from it being painfully slow sometimes.

[noi-pi]

We have the same problem at the office. When our scene starts to fill up, and textures added to the meshes, it always crash when we try to navigate. We have ATI cards BTW and changing from the default Direct X to OpenGL solved our problem.

[batteryoperatedlettuce]

That's definitely a good idea. I've always found that openGL displays much better anyway.

[Chris Johnson]

I had some bad ram last winter. I had the exact same problem. I then ran a test that checked all my ram and I found one of my ram sticks was bad. I sure was relieved about that.

[Hazdaz]

How old is the Windows installation on this PC?

How old is the MAX install on this PC?

Was there a previous install of MAX on this PC?

Have you run any hardware-checking programs? Scan your RAM and run a check on the harddrive.

Have you run any Registry-cleaning programs?

 

In general, MAX is one of the least stable "professional" programs I have ever used. Newer versions are much better, but AutoDesk seems to not think that their high-end 3D modeling software crashes more than some freeware applications.

 

From my experience, MAX gets more and more unstable the older the Windows install is, as well as the longer your MAX program has been on a certain computer. It is usually especially bad when you have had previous installs of MAX on that machine - seems that if you wipe out the harddrive and reinstall everything from scratch, it will run better.

 

Also, some of you guys posted that OGL runs better, but MAX is like the only 3D apps that is more D3D optimized than OGL.