Editing a BiFrost Motion Field crashing/freezing Maya

[zoe.nelsonP754P]

First time using BiFrost.

I have 64GB of RAM, and allocated the amounts below.

I have also tried this with and without activating Scratch Caching.

For my assignment I need to edit the Field Direction, but the second I edit any of the attributes, Maya crashes or Freezes. If I open the task manager to force close it, it's hardly using my CPU and RAM.

I also make sure to wait for the entire playback to be cached before making changes but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

Please help!

[morten.bojsen-hansen]

I can see you're using Maya 2023.3. Which version of Bifrost are you using?

Are you able to provide a scene file and steps to reproduce the crash?

[zoe.nelsonP754P]

Thank you for replying! I was previously using the latest 2024 Maya, but did a fresh install of 2023 to see if it would fix the issue, but I have the same issue in both versions. 

I'm using the Bifrost that's included with the educational license of Maya. My installed programs lists

I see these instructions on downloading updates

And that there appears to be a Bifrost updates for Maya 2023 windows that are versions 2.7.1.1 and 2.8.0.0

I'm not sure which version of Bifrost I was using in 2024. Would you recommend going back to 2024? And if so, should I get the latest 2.8.0.0 version?

I tried to upload a maya scene but I got the error message

I'm not sure how else to share the file.

:: EDIT ::

I went ahead and downloaded 2.8.0.0 for 2023, and uninstalled 2.5.1.0 - I figured this HAD to be what was wrong and why it wasn't working.

I was able to actually make a few changes to a motion field, but I got cocky and added in a second one and it crashed again. Doesn't seem to have fixed the problem.

For reference, I'm only using ~3500 particles and I'm not even getting more that 11pfs. I don't know what else I can do to optimize the calculations and playback.

[morten.bojsen-hansen]

I noticed that you found the other thread about motion fields and cached playback. Do you get crashes if cached playback is disabled? There is a known crashing bug (BIFROST-4713) with cached playback and motion fields and I just want to rule that out.

[zoe.nelsonP754P]

Oh wow I must have completely misread that other thread in my panic. I thought the solution was to toggle it on and off, but I now see it's to disable it completely. It worked initially then later crashed so I made the incorrect assumption that it wasn't the solution I needed.

So far, I've not experienced crashes with cached playback disabled, and was able to complete my assignment.

How does Scratch Cache work in this instance? Should I enable it or just resign myself to some slower playback and have more patience?

If this bug is unique to Motion Fields, if I don't use them in a project is cached playback safe to use?

[morten.bojsen-hansen · Accepted solution]

The bug was logged as related to motion fields only. If it happens in other cases we are not aware of that yet.

[zoe.nelsonP754P]

I wanted to update this thread because the bug also occurs with killplanes.

If I have cached playback enabled and I add in a killplane to my scene, Maya freezes until I have to use the task manager to force quit the program.

[morten.bojsen-hansen]

@zoe.nelsonP754P Thank you for letting us know. I'll update the story to include this information.