Repeated crashing with 'scatter' compound object.

[nathankenyon]

Hey folks,

 

So I've been using scatter to test creating foliage.

My workflow has been to model in sketchup, import to max, and use scatter with a distribution object. I then take that object, save it in its own file, and use a replace import to instance the compound object foliage throughout the scene.

 

At first I was having problems with Max crashing every time I selected 'hide distribution object'. Then I figured out that if I set display to 'proxy' instead of 'mesh' for the leaves before selecting the distribution object it would work fine.

 

Problem is, when I go to render with Mental Ray, I get the same crash (not details, just that the program has encountered and error yadayada) Scene renders fine without the foliage, but with the compound object it crashes.

 

If I add a turn to poly modifier to the compound object and 'collapse to' it renders fine, but the leaves collapse to rectangular proxy objects instead of the original geometry, which looks terrible. If I try switching back to a mesh display on the compound object before collapsing to poly, Max crashes the same.

 

Help!? I'm using 3DS Max 2016, Windows 10, with 16gb RAM and an i7-5820K @3.30GHz (hex-core), NVidia Quadro K420 GPU