I was looking forward to this release of Max, mainly because Max 9 was so disfunctional and caused me a lot of problems over the last year. I was hoping a lot of the bugs would be fixed now.
It seem the problems with colision pairs in reactor are still there. You should be able to select two objects and hit ‘Enable/Disable’, but you can’t. The other method is to open the define colision pairs box, but then it gets worse. It shoud only list objects that are in an RB collection, but it lists every object in the scene, which in a large scene with hudreds or thousands of objects is painful to sift through. Then it gets worse still, after you’ve spent all afrtnoon defining the pairs, if you shut down go home and load the scene up again the next day, it’s forgotten them all so you have to do it all again.
It all worked fine in Max 8, but not in Max 9, I was devistated to find it’s still there in 2008, so please Autodesk do something about it.
Also, the save file thing still turns everything to lowercase, although this is only mildly anoying.
On the bright side, Hair and Fur now seems to render properly with mental ray, which is nice to know.
And before anyone says it, I did send a defect report to Autodesk about the collision pairs thing several months ago.

yeah - first thing i checked in the demo if they updated the havok/reactor engine but it shows the same version
so think they even did’nt touch it ....

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Hold on. I was wrong. They havnt fixed the hair problem, I must have just been lucky on my early tests, look:-

	Attachment

Do you know what caused that Hair and Fur problem?  It looks to me like the model with Hair wasn’t attached to the bone

"Nature is the Mother of Learning”

Please visit http://www.handy-arts.com

The characters all have a skull cap attatched to the head bone. This is just one frame of many, most of the frames are fine, it’s just a few that render the hair in the position it was at frame 0. It’s usually the first frame that a render node renders, so if you render on a single machine starting at frame 0 you won’t see it, but if you use a render farm and/or start at at a later frame it’s a problem.

You can try it, this is the step by step way to recreate the problem that I tried to submit on the ‘Defect Report Submission Form’, only when I click ‘Submit Bug’ I get ‘The page cannot be displayed’ every time.

1. Start Max.
2. Assign mentatray as the production renderer.
3. Create a biped.
4. Create an object to represent a character’s skull cap.
5. Add Hair and Fur modifier to the skull cap.
6. Place the skull cap at the bipeds head.
7. Link it to the biped’s head.
8. Animate the biped Eg. load a .bip file something with lots of movement llike the sample dance files.
9. Set the animation to render a sequence and submit to Backburner.
10. Let the render nodes complete a few frames, then start server.exe on your workstation.
11. When rendering has finished examine the frames.
12. Note the bad frames and look at Queue Monitor to see who rendered them.

The first frame each node renders will have the hair in the position from frame 0, depending on how many nodes you have and how much movement there is at the begining of the animation this may or may not be obvious. Because the workstation started later, it’s first frame will have the hair well out of place.

Thank you for your information.  I will try this.  I wish to know how to fix this since I am gonna use Hair and Fur modifier for my next project animation.

"Nature is the Mother of Learning”

Please visit http://www.handy-arts.com

Two way to stop it would be to not use the MR renderer, or not net-render and always start at frame 0. But for me this isn’t practical. I do have another idea that I’ve yet to try, delete all the bad frames and frame 0 then re-render it with skip existing images checked on a single machine, so the only first bad frame will be frame 0 when the hair is in it’s first position.

I would agree with that quick solution.  If rendering frame 0 causes that problem, I do not usually render at frame 0 as well.  Since that would be initial pose for my character.

"Nature is the Mother of Learning”

Please visit http://www.handy-arts.com

There is another thread about the Hair thing here if anyone is interested.
http://area.autodesk.com/for...y+netrender-problem/#4061
Since this was meant to be about collision pairs.