We are experiencing an odd crash issue that has appeared on several of our systems in the past week or 2. We are running Deadline 10.1.15.2, but now several of our systems crash at launch. The only solution to mitigate this is remove the Deadline submitter script in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2021\scripts\Startup folder.
Has anybody seen this issue? What is particularly diabolical is that it does not affect all of our systems. In fact, on one of the affected systems I did complete and clean uninstall of 2021 and deleted all the associated directories and user preferences folder. I reinstalled and launched 3dsmax, all was well. I installed the submitter scripts and 3dsmax crashed at launch. I updated to 2021.3.2 and I still get the crash if the SMTDSetup.ms script is in the folder listed above. This affects 2019 and 2020 as well. Oh, and I have 2 Deadline servers and I tested with the newer version of Deadline (10.1.16.5) and it still occurs.
I have not heard of this problem, but let’s try to understand what’s going on.
The SMTDSetup.ms is not mandatory, so removing it from the installations is totally ok. Its main job is to find where the Repository is, and run the SMTDMenuCreator.ms to create the Deadline menu. Once the Deadline menu exists, the script could be removed. Or you could install the SMTD scripts manually by dragging the Client scripts into the 3ds Max viewports to evaluate, and then running the menu creator once to make the menu.
The code in SMTDSetup.ms performs four main steps - running the deadlinecommandbg.exe executable from the Deadline \bin directory, waiting for the output files to appear, reading the output to determine where the Repository files are, and calling fileIn() on the SMTDMenuCreator.ms file.
If your Client is connected to the Repository directly, the return value would be the path to the share where the Repository is installed. If you are using a Remote Connection Server, you will get a path to a local cache that gets populated with the requested folder, e.g. C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Thinkbox\Deadline10\cache\QC6Q1XV3ZclisdmBNCBAEbj6oc\submission/3dsmax/Main
You could add debug prints along the way to find out what is causing the crash - maybe even writing to an external text file so when 3dsMax crashes, you still get a log with what happened within the script. Or you could try commenting out parts of the script, like the filein() call, to see if they affect the crash or not. In that case, you would know if the error is in the Setup file, or in the Menu Creator file, and go from there.
If you need assistance, we could even arrange for a live call to look at what is happening and try to debug…