Indigo Renderer Forum

I'm experiencing a guaranteed crash when exporting animations. 3DS simply quits with a non-descript error message "3ds Max has encountered an error and needs to close". The logfiles of 3DS do not show anything specific for this / with this timestamp. However, they do mention frequent errors with "unable to read/write a file".

After reading this forum I've tried many different things already:
- Updating 3DSmax with all the service packs and hotfixes
- Updating video drivers & windows
- Different versions of maxigo & indigo (2.4, 2.6, 3.0).
- It happens on 2 different computers; one has max2011, the other max2012.

None of this seems to work.

The exact moment of crashing is during the export in Maxigo. The progress bar is typically somewhere in the middle. There are a few peculiar aspects though:
- If I try a very simple test scene (~5 objects or so), it does NOT crash
- If i start throwing out objects from my normal scene (~few hundred objects), at some point it MAY render a few frames correctly.
- If I ONLY export the camera, it will NOT crash. Exporting scene, geometry, materials, instances (or any combination) will result in a guaranteed crash.

What could be wrong?

Animation support in current Maxigo is experimental and is mostly meant for exporting camera animations. It seems (and i'm not 100% sure) that maxscript garbage collector is not doing very good job when exporting large scenes over and over again. That could raise memory issues.
So if it's not working for you, then there is nothing i can do.
BUT..next Maxigo version will have a proper animation support (even backburner support).

BUT..next Maxigo version

When will the new version?

I need to finish writing new Maxigo material type (old one is too.. "clumsy" to continue with).
1/3 of it is done. So if I get the rest of it worked out, then I will upload a public build. It depends on how much free time I will have in following months.

Thanks for quick reply Suvakas.

It depends on how much free time I will have in following months

following months?!

I know this may sound a bit harsh. But since indigo indeed is a commercial product, would not it be better to hire someone competent to write proper plugin for Max, and pay him to get involved in this project full-time?

Yeah, I agree with rawalanche.This is main problem of Indigo not being more popular, even it is one of best unbiased render engines at market today, IMHO.

I am not sure what are costs, and will Indigo team be able to afford that, but Next Limit approach with plugins is good to follow.

Well I have to say, I'm mostly finding myself using vray these days when it comes to commercial production.
Not speaking of plugins issues, having a fully integrated renderer in the host application (without export times and "surprises") is a huge time saver as far as I'm concerned.