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Arnold constant crashing

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Message 1 of 3
Dchimenti
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Arnold constant crashing

 

Hello, all.

 

I'm getting an inconsistent but constant crash with Arnold.  This crash is happening across multiple systems so giving you CPU, RAM, etc. is kinda useless.

 

Where can I go to get an analysis of my crash data?  I have an education license so Autodesk treats me like a leper when I find problems. :slightly_smiling_face:   All I have is you.

 

THANKS!

2 REPLIES 2
Message 2 of 3

Hello,

Method 1: Could you check the update of your program?
Method 2: Could you check the update of your graphics card?
Method 3: You can uninstall and reinstall 3ds Max, you can perform a clean uninstall from the relevant link.

 

Link: https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Clean-uninstall.ht...

 

Enjoy your work.

Message 3 of 3

Thanks for your reply!

 

The interesting thing was the same crash was happening on multiple systems that have varying GFX cards. Although, in this case, I'm using CPU for rendering.

Nevertheless,  I'm pretty fastidious about keeping everything updated from drivers to software versions.   Out of the pressure of a deadline, I was finally able to experiment with my animation by slowly removing elements from the scene to see if I stopped crashing and I inevitably found the culprit.

A single object was missing a single bitmap in it's Arnold material. A normal map to be specific.

 

You'd think I would get a warning every time it attempted to render (on all systems) but I didn't.  Or, at least, you would think it would crash consistently in the same frame but it didn't.  It's one of those situations where the inconsistency made it so hard to track down the issue.  But that's life in the tech world.

 

It's actually a theme I've encountered in the past with Arnold. It really really doesn't react well (sometimes) to missing maps.

I attributed another time I was getting crashes to a similar situation where a material had broken bitmap links but only existed in the material editor. It wasn't assigned to any object. But it was still crashing at inconsistent times.

 

This all can be officially assigned to operator error.  But, again, it's the inconstancies that made it tough to hunt down the problem.  Weird.

 

 

 

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