A Tale of Ten Thousand Crashes
 

Now that we've all shipped our final videos, i'd like to see how many people were in the same boat i was in.

Did anyone else experience ten thousand crashes while using 3DS Max? I was using version 5.1 on both an XP Pro machine and a Win 2000 machine, and on both i got on average a fatal error or program error at least once and hour.

I had some trouble with 3DS. For the first few weeks I had both MAX 5 and Nortons Antivirus 2003 installed on my XP PRO computer.

As it turns out, MAX's C-DILLA is not compatable with Antivirus 2003. I was getting crashes a lot, and looking at my task manager I could see that the system processes were being taken up by winlogon.exe. After a lot of searching I found a link to a thread about the compatability issues. I promptly uninstalled Norton and everything was fine from there on.

(NOTE: You can also download a fixed version of C-DILLA, but my Norton was a demo and it was pissing me off).

My buddy Lev, on the other hand was not so lucky. I have a feeling he'll post here because his computer was super crash-prone.

Our animation team used our own computers, so we were constantly lugging them back and forth. His computer must have quit on him. It was overheating and all sorts of stuff. There was also a 50/50 chance that Max would fail upon opening it up and he'd have to restart it.

I have heard some complaints about Max's stability before. I guess you aren't the only one.

I had that problem too with Norton Antivirus and i did update the C-dilla drivers. However the spontaneous crashes that i encountered occured either after i updated, or on another machine without Norton installed.

i had this problem that pissed the %$#@ out of me. Whenever I tried to merge lens effects from a scene...crash. Whenever I tried to xref a scene with lens effects...crash. Whenever I tried to just merge a lens effect only from another scene...crash. Oh well....it's finallly all over.:) :) :) :)

One good thing is, you learn to save your work more often than you would with less touchy programs.

But still, if the constant crashes in this program are bugs that discreet doesn't bother to fix, how to cinematic animators, like the guys at Blizzard Entertainment, ILM, etc, put up with them?

Not to mention the commercial version of this software will cost you around 500 bucks per copy.

They arn't running them along with a bunch of other poorly written programs. Like Kazaa. Or Dos.:rolleyes:

Probally don't have overheating problems either, remember, heat causes instability.


Wetzel

$500 is the price for educational. It is around $2500 for the commercial version.

I had a crash every ten minutes. If you buy 3DS MAX 5 from discreet it costs $3,495.00 .

They don't... They have render farms that aren't used for any other reason, which eliminates the need for Norton and such, but the main thing is how the animation is put together. It's all how the different parts are put into one, and I'm not the person that does that, but from what I could gather up, large scenes should have different elements XRef-ed into them, instead of put directly in the file. If you really want to know, I'll look into it, just tell me. DOS... isn't a... program... It's an ancient base operating system. If, for some reason or another, you're running DOS, you deserve to have Max terminated... Even though it's impossible to run it through DOS, or so one would imagine... :( You get the point. Just get RedHat Linux 8 like I did... speaking of, I hope they sponsor us again.

They don't. Most professionals use Maya for any major work. Click the link for examples.

3D Studio Max pales in comparison to Maya. It costs $7,000 for a copy.

Actually this is not true at all with the release of version 5. How the trend normally goes is that most movies use Maya and most games use 3ds max (I know a lot of companies use other spawn off's of both). However 3ds max has been used in movies and Maya has been used in games. Also although Maya is only 1500, don't let that fool you. To get the full experience out of Maya, you have to but a lot of plug-ins and different add-ons. Max 5 on the other hand which is a huge improvement of 4 (much better renderer, the feedback in animating is gone and other new plug-ins) comes loaded for around $5,600 though I have seen it less (yes i know this is the price because i just met with a 3ds max teacher a month ago). Both programs are great though, and I really cannot give tell you which one is better than the other. I think that it is more of a preference. However lightwave (which is a product of Maya) rocks and is simple to use.

3dmax5 retail price is around $3500 - $4000, and yes maya is
very expensive program that is around $7000 - $8000 but the thing is
that maya also comes with a professional renderprogram called
mentalray that are used for many renderings in movies. Mentalray
is very competitive against pixar's renderman that is also $8000 retail
and $2000 in educational. There is also programs such as Softimage's
XSI and Electrimage. These were used for making starwars and such.
XSI costs over $10000 and is almost known as the ultimate 3d program among the professional world.

Also Renderman was used to render, all the pixar movies, and all the famou 3dgraphic movies like armageddon, starwars, Terminator.
Visit www.pixar.com

By DOS I ment Windows 9x.


Wetzel

Why didn't you say so? :p

These prices are with all the upgrades im assuming. Yeah I forgot to mention XSI which is an incrediable program that I have never used but would love to (maybe when im making 5,000,000,000 a year i'll buy it). Renderman is way too over priced in my mind, though it is a awsome program, I don't think its worth 8000 (they should ower the price :D :D )

where did you guys hear that all the big ones only use Maya? Thats BS, Blizzard does use 3ds MAX and many other companies do as well. ILM uses pretty much everything. Jimmy Neutron was done entirely in Lightwave, and Toy Story was done in Alias(but that was waaaay back...now alias isnt so great anymore for the $70,000 price tag). And just go to softimage's web site, they have a ton of examples where their program has been used.

The reason they dont have crashes as much is b/c their systems are so much more stable (when properly configured). When I worked at my job at Johnson Controls the computers all cost around $9000. They dont pay all that extra cash for nothing(Although, when I worked there, everything was configured poorly, so most of the stability was wasted). Also, junk on the computers is regulated, so yeah, there is no Kazaa or any other type of destabilizing program.

Oh yeah, Maya Complete costs about $1500 and comes with all the features a one man animation team would need. However, if you want all the cool network licensing stuff and network rendering you need to get the Maya unlimited version at about $7000. However, you only need one of these if you want to do network rendering.

ILM uses their own suite of software...

many large places run on different platforms (many have upgraded to 64-bit by now) so they are much more stable than our feeble x86 processors!

*jeremy

this is my first year using 3ds max, and i;m not liking it too much... i've always been a C4D user, which may not be as powerful as max, but i've been able to model things way eaiser in it than in max... and i also have had 3ds max crash on me.... are we only restricted to use 3ds max?

They do? I dunno, but I've seen many different web sites brag about having ILM use their software. I specifically remember softimage having articles specifically about ILM and how softimage was integrated into their movies. ILM does develop their own software for their own in house needs, but I dont think they use only that stuff.

[edit]check it out: http://www.softimage.com/home/press/...18_ILM_XSI.htm