Backburner Manager and Monitor Issues 3ds Max 2013, anyone else?

[kevinmcgowan]

Hey All, we have upgraded to 3ds Max 2013 and we have had constant headaches with the Manager. When viewing jobs in the Monitor, if you change priority or try to delete jobs it crashes a lot!. It's not with every job but enough that it's a real issue. Bigger jobs seem to be the worst. You literally can not not touch them without the Manager crashing.

The bigger jobs that have been sent at the moment are Max 2011 files, so we don't have a great benchmark as to whether it's as buggy with big 2013 files. We are also running the manager on Windows Server 2003.

I would love to know if anyone else is having issues. If not, what are you running the Manager on, or if you have any other ideas as to what could be causing our issues. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[salvador]

Well, I just did, but certainly not this kind. In the end, it only took to set the manager and every job to "localhost" instead of my IP. But never crashed or anything. I don't think I can be of more assistance. Moreover, I don't use it for net rendering but only to send more than one render job overnight.

 

Good luck!

[Scott Schroeder]

Windows Server 2003 could be part of the issue as it's pretty out of date these days. How big are you talking about? Backburner tends to get crashy when you have heavy scenes getting pushed over a network that cannot support them quickly. Backburner likes instant feedback and if it can't get that, it goes on strike and stops working.

 

What Version of backburner are you running? The update for 2013 is buggy as snot. Also, make sure you are not in IPv6 and still using IPv4.

[kevinmcgowan]

Thanks for the info Salvador.

[kevinmcgowan]

Hey Scott, the file that was particularly bad was about 750MB. I tried to use xref's in the file originally but that crashed over the network instantly. We are using Version 2013.0.2.1590, as you says it's very buggy. I think we will try running the manager on a Windows 7 machine. Thanks for your advice.

[Scott Schroeder]

Yeah, that's your problem right there is your size. Try using proxies for some of your larger objects or chunks. Also, use "Compress on Save" if you haven't don so already. That shrinks down your max files with very little performance impact.

 

As I mentioned, Backburner is a good tool but it really struggles with large scenes, think of trying to fit 200 pounds of sausage in a 5 pound bag. How is your network? Is it fast or does it have it's own issues?

 

2013.2 is also just god awful. Revert back to 2013.0 or whatever comes with Max2013.

 

Make sure that you need every bit of that 750 mb file. All too often when I get into files that large, I find I can clean out 50% of that in just garbage and unused objects.