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about 20(!) crashes during one working day.
causes: starting fire render, starting CPU production render, stopping fire render, changing objects position when fire is working, changing light intensity when fire is working and my favorite - during file saving when fire is stopped.
are you serious?

It's definitely a lot less stable than before, and almost all crashes seem related to FIRE, but also right after having ran FIRE and having stopped it. I got a crash during save after running FIRE, stopping it, and then trying to save the file.

I have the same issues running FIRE via the Maya plugin.

Well .. I dunno .. in my case (Mac Pro / Maya 2018) FIRE works pretty much as it should .. altho I have a little feeling that it is slightly slower than it used to be .. but maybe it's just me ..

And, you know .. there are unspoken rules for working with realtime progressive rendering ... like stopping it before making any geometry related changes (adding, hiding, deleting etc), or editing lights on an object level (like deleting or adding new lights) - it is okay to change the position and intensity.

I mainly use fire for materials fine tuning and .. well .. lights

Are you using high quality Fire? I detected (and fixed for next version) a saving issue, due to preview imge being too big as result of using high quality Fire.

no. CPU draft, default preferences. quality 2, samples 7, 20s limit

im having a lot of crashes too to a point im really frustrated on using maxwell.

Last i had was yesterday night, maxwell studio, imported some light bulb presets having opened interactive preview inside maxwell studio, i was changing the light intensity and the program just shut itself down. No warnings nothing, back to desktop.

Its not the first time, but im so annoyed that this software became so unstable with version 4.
3.2 wasnt like this at all.. not remotely.

the same problem ; every few minutes maxwell closed ; if i save or i add a modifier or render !
and every time i need to do the same job again and again

Maybe you are using a very big Fire window?

Best,
Fernando

I rarely use fire and very small window
Maybe the developers make this version for powerful pcs or it have problems compared to v3

Working on texturing a simple primitive and Fire keeps causing Maya to crash. This is getting fucking ridiculous with no word from Next Limit on a Maya plugin that is just this side of useless....

Are you on Mac or PC ?
On Mac we don't have Nvidia cards ... not anymore .. but. it feels like it is far more stable .. Last 5 years I was working purely on Mac Pro (the cylinder) with pretty okay video cards (Radeon) and 64gigs of ram .. usually. And there were some crashes .. for sure .. but I can't compare them to the situations you guys are dealing with.

What you experiencing, feels like it is something with the Video card .. or ram. I believe for a more stable work with Maxwell (and handling mid-to-heavy scenes) you would want to have a pretty good video card. With at least 3-6 gigs of video memory. And if fire runs on CPU then you would want to have at least 64 gigs of ram - to transfer your data from video memory to cpu.
Seriously, Mac Pro (with radeon video cards), 6 gigs of video memory and 64 gigs of Ram - should give you a pretty solid workflow.

sometimes it is more simple to change render engine than to change or upgrade a PC

gloomer wrote:sometimes it is more simple to change render engine than to change or upgrade a PC

Personally, I would dread having to change render engine, having done it a couple of times before getting into Maxwell! It is definitely not something to take lightly, given the large amount of materials in my library that would all need to be rebuilt in the new engine. Even if there is a Maxwell material converter (I do not know of one), the likelihood of getting a one-one conversion without needing to spend lots of time tweaking things to suit the nuances of the new engine is very low.

Ideally we would all have another one, or two rendering engines to hand to cover all bases should one update cause instability issues, but maintaining 2, or 3 libraries of materials for different rendering engines seems like a lot of time-consuming work- Coming from the point of view of a small company or one, or two people that is.

I have also been noticing frequent crashes with both studio and the sketchup plugin. SketchUp crashing is most definitely related to FIRE, however Studio crashes for me when opening an mxs file from explorer (the first time), saving a file (sometimes, but often enough), or at any other random point in time it doesn't like something I am trying to do. However, some of this instability I experienced in v3.5 as well, so I have always put it down to some issue with my pc, or Windows etc and frustratingly lived with it.

ideally we should have a working software. that's all.
sincerely I don't understand why Maxwell team doesn't respond here and the software still not upgraded yet. there are a lot of bugs and GPU render stills useless. I only suppose that version 4 will remain unusable and will be replaced for additional payments.