We’re having an issue (on some machines) where 3DS Max 2009 SP1 crashes upon opening the material editor.  Even an empty scene file causes the error.  The error message is that the application has become unstable and must be closed.  The machines are identical images and hardware.  XP Pro 64-bit.  Not sure why some are afflicted.  Has this been something someone else has had an experience with?  Is there a solution or a place to look for the cause?

Hi,

Since the machines are identical, I’m not sure why that would affect one machine vs. another.  The only time I’ve actually seen this issue is when I had HDRI images in the editor, and for some reason it did not like that image on that particular machine on that particular configuration.  That does not explain your situation.

On the affected machines try switching the graphics driver in Max to OpenGL or the Software driver, and see if you still get that issue.

It also try changing the configuration to not use mental ray as the default; go to Customize then Custom UI and Defaults Switcher and switch to a non mental ray version.  Restart Max.  You’ll then have non mental ray materials in the material editor and it will be not not be using mental ray to render the editor sample spheres. 

Newer graphics drivers are not always better when it comes to stability in 3ds Max.  What video cards are you using?

Jenni

Author of “Mastering mental ray”:  http://www.mastering-mentalray.com
4D Artists, Inc.:  http://www.4da-inc.com
Chicago 3ds Max User’s Group: http://www.max3ds.com

Max Design 2012; Win 7x64 12gb i7 Dual GTX 580; Win 7x64 Intel i7 4-core@3gHx 12gb Quadro 5000 and Tesla C2050.

Thanks Jennifer, I thought that too.  The vid card is usually my first thing to blame. :-) I actually found out it’s something more complicated by our dev team here.  We use a different .exe to load data we need and apparently that machine had an outdated version.  But it’s interesting to hear about the HDR issue.  I will have to keep an eye out for that.  Thanks.