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Hi,

I have been having a nightmare. I have some reasonably large renders with quite a lot of grass in them. They were rendering fine in 3.0. They took ages to get through the grass stage, but after that they rendered fine and I left them overnight (no problems). Since updating to 3.1, I have had to try them again. They keep crashing whenever I try. My mac shuts off completely and restarts. One time it did this it caused (or possibly coincidently) my hard drive died. This was an expense to fix and wasted a couple of days to rebuild my system from backups. I have tried it again and it is still crashing every time.

Interestingly it crashed during the render stage (not at the beginning when the grass is being calculated). I have tried the exact same render without the grass and it works fine. So it is definitely the grass that it is causing the crash.

Can anyone help? I am worried that the crashing is going to result in further damage/problems. Maxwell was always so stable in the past. I had a few crashed if I had too much grass (but only ever the application - never the whole OS)

Hi glassbathroom,

An application can never crash a computer (at least since OS X on mac side, and win xp on pc side). As you said it can crash the application but not the whole system. The OS is protected from applications and when the system crashes is because there is a problem in the system (being it the OS or the hardware). Maxwell consumes lots of resources, RAM and CPU , it can stress the hardware quite a lot and it can make the system problems to appear, but not because Maxwell make the system crash. For example you may have a broken RAM chip and maxwell consumes so much RAM that makes the system use the problematic area, or the hard disk has problems and if its using virtual memory it is being saved in problematic areas. Some macs come with a hardware test DVD, or some way to check everything is correct, you should try to make that check.

Said this, if you want you can send us the scene or put it in a server and send us by private message the download URL and we will take a look to your scene.

nachob

Hi nachob,

Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate it.

All I know is that the combination of Maxwell and my Mac has currently caused a great deal of stress and extra work. I appreciate this may not be caused by Maxwell, but it is a problem none the less. My system does crash when I run Maxwell (not on any other application). Believe me, running an application can crash a computer (even if it is not the cause). I did wonder if the failing hard drive was the source of the issue, but I have removed this now and it still does it.

I will PM a link to one of the scenes. I would appreciate it, if you can have a look at it.

glassbathroom

For the benefit of others, I followed nachob's suggestions (via PM) of changing the grass from curved to flat. This seems to have sorted the issue (on initial tests). I will leave it running overnight to check on this. Hopefully it will work OK.