[lilamili]

Hello,

when I render with maxwell fire sketch up is always crashing. This happens while "material processing". (But also comparing to before the whole exporting process takes longer.)
I had a problem with crashing some weeks ago too, but then I updated to the new beta and it seemed to work then. Now it is crashing again. Again I updated to the last beta from march 26 but this did not help. I am working with skechtup pro 2014.

The model is not very complex, 7,4 MB. Some materials are just basic colors from sketch up. Could this be the reason?

I am working on a mac 2,3 GHz Intel core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

What can I do to solve the problem?

Thanks, Andrea

...now I just tried to render a different model (which is more complex and bigger) and here it seems to work well. So it must be a problem with this particular model.

[JDHill]

I would like to take a look at the model if possible (if it zips small enough for email, mine is jeremy at nextlimt dotcom, otherwise you could use a service like dropbox). There is not anything that should possibly crash during the plugin's synchronization of materials, but I'm not clear whether you're referring to that, or to a message you are seeing in the Maxwell FIRE window. At any rate, I'd first check whether you could be running out of memory due to something like the use of a pretesselated displacement material, or grass applied to a large plane, and so on.

[lilamili]

Thank you for this quick reply!

I have sent you an email with the model.
And yes I refer to the message "material processing" on the window of maxwell fire.

[lilamili]

Oh, and I forgot to say, I wanted to render scene 7 which is a perspective. I think the scene with the ground view is saved when you open the file...

[JDHill]

Thanks, that makes things clear. The problem is that it looks like nearly every textured face in the model uses custom positioning. The way SketchUp works, this means that a separate texture file needs to be written to disk for every face; this is taking an extremely long time to do, and results in much wasted memory once the rendering begins, due to the need to load some hundreds of textures. This more commonly happens with trees and other vegetation.

The quickest solution is to group the entire model, then enable right-click > Maxwell > UV Coordinates > Ignore Distortion; if you do this, you should find the model exports and begins rendering very quickly (a couple of seconds). Note that this means some textures may not appear correctly, since you are basically ignoring the custom positioning -- if that is a problem, then you can either ungroup the model and apply the flag to individual sub-groups or components, or go into the group and enable UV Coordinates > Default SketchUp on specific child groups or components. This will work because the flag is inherited, unless overridden.

[lilamili]

Sorry for replying so late...but it worked well. Thank you!

[amsta76]

Hi, I thought I would reply to this thread with the same issue, rather than start a new post on the same topic.. Is this correct etiquette?

My ever evolving sketchup model has started to crash on me when rendering in Maxwell Fire. I have an earlier working version of my model that renders fine but it is going to be a real pain to rollback to that. Fire hangs on "Preprocessing additional parameters" on the Fire render splash page using the Maxwell Plugin. I thought it might be recent (wood) materials added from Maxwell Resources I added into my model (I read about displacement causing memory issues) but I removed all these recent (wood) materials but still no joy. Looking at Windows Task Manager the Sketchup process is using around 1.8GB of RAM during the hang.

When I click on the Render button instead of the Fire button in the Maxwell toolbar, Maxwell Render opens and then stops and crashes at 'Processing additional parameters" as well.

Does anyone have any suggestions ? I am happy to PM my model so that a guru can take a look! It's 12MB so I can use dropbox etc.

BTW. I tried the recommendation in this thread and still no luck. I am using the latest Maxwell V3 (3.0.1.0 x64) that I purchased and downloaded a few days ago (prior to that I was using the Free Maxwell Plugin for this model)

Many thanks,

Adam.

[JDHill]

Please feel free to start a new topic if what you are dealing with is not precisely the same as that indicated in an already-existing thread.

In this case, I would first like to confirm that you are dealing with a hang, by having you check CPU usage in task manager when the stop occurs -- if it is at 0% this would be a hang, otherwise, it would indicate that the code has entered an infinite loop, or is simply working on something that is taking a long time. A hang is something that may be caused by two threads both waiting for the other to complete before proceeding, which will never happen.

If the code is not hanging, then it may be reasonable to believe the render engine when it says it is processing additional parameters, though in this case we don't know precisely what that means. It may be that Maxwell Grass was added to a large plane at some point, or that Maxwell Sea was added, or that a displacement material has been applied, and that there is now a lot of new pre-processing that must happen, which may or may not complete successfully, given the 32-bit memory limitation (generally ~1.5 GB for a 32-bit OS, or ~3.5 for a 64-bit one).

If nothing obvious was added, it may be worth updating to the current beta plugin (available here) to see if you could be dealing with an issue that has been fixed, though it is necessary to note that this beta version has a crash issue with some MXS References, if you are using those.

If nothing above helps, then yes, please send me a link to download your model, and I can try to see what's happening.

[JDHill]

Thanks for sending the model. I cannot tell you much about the actual cause of the issue, but it looks to be localized to the Draft engine, and related to a certain combination of geometry and/or materials (in particular, if you delete the ladder-shaped group floating in midair, east of the building, or one of the emitter discs inside a bedroom, or the roof of the building, etc). I also note that I am unable to reproduce the problem using the current (internal) code, so perhaps something has been improved.