Baking Viewport/exchange images - autosave - relentless freezing and crashing - force quit

[calum.bettison]

Since I updated to C4D 2024.1.0 and C4DtoA 4.6.6.2, C4D is freezing several times an hour, it's almost unusable. I have to force quit and reopen backup file.

The symptoms of the problem:

C4D freezes and beach ball starts spinning, the task manager displays "Baking Viewport/exchange images" and the little task manager loading bar gets stuck. Whole program is unresponsive.

What seems to lead up to/cause the problem:

1. When c4d autosaves, or I press cmd-Z to undo, all Arnold material previews reload in the materials palette, which seems to trigger this "Baking Viewport/exchange images" message.
2. If I do anything when this "Baking Viewport/exchange images" is happening, C4D instantly locks up.

 

What I've tried to do to fix it:

Uncheck these boxes, which stops the materials from displaying as rendered shader balls (just an Arnold thumbnail instead). Regardless, every autosave, or most "undo's" trigger the material previews to reload and the "Baking Viewport/exchange images" message to appear. And almost always I'm actively doing something at the time, which inevitably causes the freeze.

 

Ive also unchecked only the bottom box, which seems to fix the problem (I haven't done it for enough length of time to be 100% sure). But when you cant see any of the materials in your project its pretty unworkable.

As usual... looming deadline. Working like this as it stands feels like wading through syrup.

Any help would be much much appreciated.

Im on:

macOS Monterey 12.6.3

2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7

16GB 2133MHz LPDDR3

Radeon Pro 460 4 GB

[calum.bettison]

Ive now turned off autosave, and fortunately since then I've not had any freezes.

Autosave and backup files have saved my skin many times in the past, so it feels a bit unnerving going forward without having it on.

Obviously its good practise to habitually save along the way, but having the spare copies in the backup folder is reassuring in the event of a corrupt file too.

[peter_horvath]

Looks like the same issue as https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/arnold-for-cinema-4d-forum/materials-after-autosave/td-p/12405108 and https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/arnold-for-cinema-4d-forum/hang-in-c4d-2024-1-0-on-macos-sonoma/td-p/....

Still investigating with Maxon to find out whether it's a bug in Cinema 4D or in the plugin.

The only workaround for now, as you mentioned, is to turn off viewport previews in the materials or disable auto save.

[calum.bettison]

Hi Peter, ok thanks for confirming. Hopefully this can get sorted soon!

Obviously the freezing and crashing is the main issue, but I would question why all the materials need to reload every time autosave happens or I undo anyway?

It seems like an unnecessary task for the system to have to do, and even if it didn't freeze, there would still be an amount of processing and potentially viewport lag.

Cheers.