We’ve been running 3DS Max for the last few months with 2 concurrent tasks on some of our newer slaves, we’re finding this has a worthwhile benefit to us in terms of render time but that 3DS Max is not necessarily the happiest with the setup. Periodically it seems to corrupt the preferences for Max and a machine will crash out whenever it tries to render. I’ve attached the full log.
We have found the brute force method of deleting the preferences folder for 3DS Max (C:\Users*****\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax) resolves the problem and I can do this by executing a command from the Monitor. I’m guessing that both instances try to modify a file at the same time and end up corrupting it. I’m basically looking for a good solution to catch this. Maybe an event that catches the error and runs a batch script to delete the folder on that machine? Or maybe you have an idea on how to stop this from happening in the first place…? I might be able to narrow down what’s actually breaking it the next time it happens… Any thoughts you have would be great.
Yeah the problems you are seeing is why we recommend against concurrent tasks with 3ds max, as it messes things up. I can check with our max support folks and see if they think this would be feasible, but in the past the answer I got was “Don’t run concurrent tasks, multithreading should be enough”. I’ll let you know what I hear.
Thanks Dwight, as I said the brute force method works quite effectively, other than me having to catch the erroring slave. There’s never anything in that folder on the render slaves that needs to be kept. Catching the error with an event and triggering the delete would I think be an effective way of bypassing it.
I have reviewed the log and a few things stand-out:
This is odd. Can you also post the other thread’s log (thread:0) from exactly the same time. I want to compare notes here. Is Backburner actually installed on this machine? If not, then that is actually the error here. Are their binaries in the above file path on this system?
The ‘base’ install of 3dsMax 2016 hasn’t been great for many customers. Can you update to the latest SP?
I’ve seen the above before, but only when running multiple threads of 3dsMax as you are. These errors are coming from the open source log4cplus project that provide cout logging for c++ apps. In this case, the Autodesk Communication Center or whatever it is called these days, is unable to initialize for this instance of 3dsMax. I suspect the ADSK developer didn’t consider multiple instances of their app being run at once. Still, this error isn’t a show-stopper and isn’t a smoking gun for you to attach a delete command to.
So, in summary, I don’t see anything here that could be used to automate the purge.