Everything related to Studio
By Sean eivchelberger
#401662
I'm hoping someone here can offer some help, as I don't have time to wait on Maxwell's CS to take 2 weeks to reply.
I am attempting to use Maxwell Studio/Render for product illustration and arch viz. However, when navigating, editing materials or other basic operations in Studio, it will often just crash. No warning, no error, just suddenly closes/crashes. Typically it happens when "Fire" is active(GPU mode). Happens at least every hour.

System:
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
32GB RAM
NVIDIA RTX 3080 (just updated driver hoping this would help, but no)
Win10

Thanks in advance
Sean
User avatar
By Mark Bell
#401663
Hi Sean,

I've had this myself on occasion, and I'm running an older system. What I did to 'fix' it was to do a SaveAs of the Maxwell file, ie. create a copy of the current one as this may help clean any issues as it creates the newer file, then remove all unused materials leaving only assigned materials. There may be a material left that is causing the crash? I've replaced materials which have displacement and this has fixed the issue for that project. Maybe take a screen shot of your material list so you know what is left, then begin to substitute one at a time with a generic material or colour and use FIRE to see if it crashes. You can then put back the material if there was no crash and continue working through the list.
Another option is to switch to CPU and see if it still crashes. If so, maybe look at reducing some of your texture sampling sizes to a lower setting.
This may not fix your issue but it might point you in the right direction.
User avatar
By CDRDA
#401664
Studio has never been the most stable of programs in my experience. It has improved with the latest version.

I have found (and also with Sketchup plugin) that when FIRE is running, changing materials, camera angles and other environment settings is usually fine. Importing geometry, deleting stuff, editing UVs etc can cause a crash. I have also found Studio cashes frequently when re-importing an fbx and updating the existing geometry, whilst deleting and importing works fine. If I have been using Studio for some time, in particular when opening several landscape model files to render out FIRE previews for the Windows thumbnails, the program just crashes for no apparent reason, often during a save.

I mainly use Studio for creating mxs references for use in SketchUp, so my experience is quite limited. However, I have just learnt to work around the apparent limitations by using FIRE sparingly and stopping it before doing anything major.

A couple of things you may want to try in the first instance:

1. Run Studio as administrator.
2. Use Nvidia Studio drivers, a separate download
3. As Mark suggested, try using CPU FIRE, as if you are editing materials with unsupported GPU features such as SSS, it may be causing problems. You can change the FIRE options to use the CPU draft engine, or production, but I would start off with the draft engine (should be the default) and see how it goes.
4. The GPU could be running out of GPU RAM, as Maxwell is very heavy with RAM on the GPU, especially at higher resolutions. For a FIRE rendering this is unlikely to be the case... Check what other programs you have running at the same time as loads of tabs open in chrome can use a lot of GPU resources.... Allegedly! I have a 24GB card now and Maxwell GPU is finally usable, although I did find it's limit with lots of vegetation in a particularly heavy scene. This often causes a crash without any warning.

Good luck and let us know if anything has helped, for future reference!
By Sean eivchelberger
#401665
Thanks guys for the suggestions. I'll try to implement them and see what the result is.
Yesterday I decided to save every 2-3min and had no further crashes the rest of the afternoon. Idk what this means, if anything, but just thought I'd mention it.

Thanks again
Sean
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