[jrockstad]

Hi guys, having a strange problem with a scene I'm working on here. Everything was working fine until suddenly I couldn't get any renders to go through, by which I mean, I press the render button in Maya, Maxwell opens, and does... nothing. My fans don't spin up, there's no increase in memory usage, it's almost like I just opened up the program and let it idle. If I open up a console window, the debug information stops at the 'Preprocessing additional parameters' step. If I hit the stop button, Maxwell hangs and I have to force quit.

Things got even weirder when I did some troubleshooting - the only way I can get a render through is when I have no emitters in my scene, but only a physical sky for lighting. Also, if I start a new scene I can render with emitters just fine - it seems only this specific scene is affected.

I'm using Maya 2015 on OS X 10.9, with the latest beta versions of both Maxwell and the Maya plug-in.

Thanks!

[Mihnea Balta]

Hi,

Could you send me a Maya or MXS scene which reproduces this problem at mihnea.balta@gmail.com?

[jrockstad]

No problem - I have sent you an e-mail with the scene in question.

[Mihnea Balta]

It seems like an engine problem. I've reduced the scene to just the floor, ceiling, tile wall 1 and the 8 tube emitters. Removing any of these objects makes the problem go away, but if you have all of them, Maxwell hangs. I've forwarded the scene to the engine guys, let's see what they say.

As a workaround, it seems that removing any of the tube lights makes the problem go away. I see that there are 4 lights which are behind the camera, maybe you could remove two of them and still get an acceptable result, until we fix the underlying problem.

[jrockstad]

It seems like an engine problem. I've reduced the scene to just the floor, ceiling, tile wall 1 and the 8 tube emitters. Removing any of these objects makes the problem go away, but if you have all of them, Maxwell hangs. I've forwarded the scene to the engine guys, let's see what they say.

As a workaround, it seems that removing any of the tube lights makes the problem go away. I see that there are 4 lights which are behind the camera, maybe you could remove two of them and still get an acceptable result, until we fix the underlying problem.

Thanks for looking into it. This is just a scene that I'm playing around with, so in the meantime I think it's perfectly fine for me to just tweak the emitter setup a bit as you suggest.

Thanks again!

[Mihnea Balta]

The engine guys confirmed that this was a bug on their side which they fixed a short while ago. The fix will be part of the next Maxwell update.

[jrockstad]

Sounds good - thanks for checking up on that so quickly.

I'll keep an eye out for the next update.