I'm terribly sorry for reviving a 2-months old topic, but the same problem happens to me, only that I'm using Maxwell 1.0 (still, 3ds max 8 ). I can't figure out what can be wrong:
The scene rendered fine with maxwell, then after modelling more objects and modifying the scene, when I try to render (with the same material, a standard white material), max crashes (application error)...The scene renders without any problems with standard scanline or mental ray, but with maxwell it just crashes and it's very annoying.
This thing happened to the same initial objects (before adding more stuff to the scene), so I exported all the objects in a obj and imported them back in a blank scene and after that it rendered well...I didn't try to render the scene after I added just a few things, so I don't know if it's related to adding stuff, but I hardly doubt it.
Oh, I also have to mention that I once switched to mental ray, made a quick render, and then switched back to maxwell. But this crash happens all the time, every time I load the scene. Even rebooting and then opening the scene again won't work...Sorry for the long speech, but I must know the sollution to this as quickly as possible, for I'm under high pressure and I don't want to keep exporting and importing.
EDIT: I solved the problem, it turned out that I was rendering with mental ray's standard material
. but still, the first time this happened all objects had mxm materials. Oh, and I'm rendering with physical sky and sun.
All the normals & vertices & polygons of the meshes are in their place.