3dsmax freezing all of a sudden the whole PC !

NAIMA

Hello , recently my 3dsmax has started to freeze my whole pc , this is happening since two days now and didn't happen before, I went out for weekend and since I got back its doing this so its not that I did something special .

It hapens randomly seems while working on the pc with 3dsmax , no specific action , I might just be selecting a mesh or else all of a sudden the mouse stops answering and I know it happened , no response from keyboard or anything else and I am forced to switch off the power of the pc ... Useless to say that this is really annoying especially now that I was working on the final part of my model ... Does anyone knows what it can be related to or what is happening?

I checked the status of my HD as I have 4 hdd and two ssd the 128 gb one is the one where the SO is and is fine according to the disck checker. I am out of ideas as the pc seems to work fine in any other condition .

Please any help ?

musashidan

Have you installed any programs or Max plugins in that time?

NAIMA

No the only thing I remember is that a few days ago the pc all of a sudden shut down by itself like restarting in the middle of work while I was using photoshop , could it have been some kind of shadow win 10 update?

musashidan

It could have been. I've been using Win 7 SP2 for years and have auto update disabled since then. Never crashes or freezes. I see no reason to update to 10 personally. My setup has served me well in all those years without updating anything.

NAIMA

Is there a way to revert back to previous Win 10 update?

musashidan

I'm sure there is if you search on a site like Tom's hardware but as I said I'm on win 7 and never update.

Win 10 is so new in OS terms that it will probably need many, many updates until it's as stable as something like Win7 sp2.

Eric Chadwick

It might help to open Task Manager before it freezes, get Max to freeze, then alt-tab over the Task Manager and see if you can sleuth it out. It could be a GPU driver thing (try updating the driver). It could be 3ds Max itself (try cleaning your Max file, or uninstall and reinstall).

A good resource:
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/file_crashing/file_crashing.htm

NAIMA

Problem is that it freezes everything , keyboard and mouse too so I cannot alt tab , itsnot max freezing , its the whole pc when I use max after a while .... Could it be a temperature thing?

PolyHertz

It could be temperature. Keep HWMonitor running on the side and see what it tells you. Also, have some music playing just to see if that stops too, as it might just be your display freezing.

NAIMA

Actually I had a video tut on an when it froze I kept hearing the audio till it finished . In meanwhile the hdd light on case was blinkering fast till I shut down all .

PolyHertz

The still-playing audio makes me think it has to do with your GPU, but the HDD read icon flashing...hmmm...
Go to Computer Management (rmb on My Computer > Manage) , then in the left menu go to Event Viewer > Windows Logs > System, go down the middle list and see if there are any errors listed.

Moltar

Did you ever fix this issue? I'm suffering from the same problems except mine seem to be a lot more frequent. 

Mark Dygert

Sounds like heat damage to me. Either to the GPU, the CPU. Once that happens things start to get unstable more often and even at lower temps.

Think of those components as little mental chambers each holding a tiny scrap of info. When it suffers heat damage those tiny walls become weak, get holes or just fuse together and they lose their ability to reliably hold info.

It might also be the power supply. If it's under  too heavy of a load or lost a cap or two it can cause a lot of instability. If you have a way to test it with a multimeter you could figure out if it's the power supply. If you don't have one, you could reduce the number of devices plugged in and see if that helps.

But I think the problem is heat damage...

monster

What version of 3ds Max? What OS?

There's a Nvidia driver crash I was getting that was locking my PC in Max 2017. It mostly happened if I was showing textures in the viewport or in High Quality mode. I had to go back to 2014. I got a new PC a few days ago, and the new PC doesn't have this issue.

Moltar

Mark Dygert said:

Sounds like heat damage to me. Either to the GPU, the CPU. Once that happens things start to get unstable more often and even at lower temps.

Think of those components as little mental chambers each holding a tiny scrap of info. When it suffers heat damage those tiny walls become weak, get holes or just fuse together and they lose their ability to reliably hold info.

It might also be the power supply. If it's under  too heavy of a load or lost a cap or two it can cause a lot of instability. If you have a way to test it with a multimeter you could figure out if it's the power supply. If you don't have one, you could reduce the number of devices plugged in and see if that helps.

But I think the problem is heat damage...

I've been running a series of hardware tests aswell as temperature.  Everything has come back clean, which is not surprising considering the computer is only a few months old. 

I cant find any errors in the system that would indicate driver failure or something else related.  Im going to back track on a few drivers and see if I get any luck.

FYI: The issue only occurs when 3dsmax is open

Moltar

monster said:

What version of 3ds Max? What OS?

There's a Nvidia driver crash I was getting that was locking my PC in Max 2017. It mostly happened if I was showing textures in the viewport or in High Quality mode. I had to go back to 2014. I got a new PC a few days ago, and the new PC doesn't have this issue.

OS: windows 10

GPU: Nvidia 980

3dsmax 2017

I honestly can't pin point what the issue is because it has froze my PC with textures and without textures in the scene and I never work in HQ mode.

Shirk

Im actually getting this exact same issue as well, although Im not sure its coming from Max 2017. I have a gtx 1070 and I have all the same problems. 

Moltar

Shirk said:

Im actually getting this exact same issue as well, although Im not sure its coming from Max 2017. I have a gtx 1070 and I have all the same problems. 

Turning the view-port quality down seems to have helped somewhat for now.

Revel

Bluescreen randomly popup when I close 3ds max seems like a normal thing to happen on my PC, wait for it to restart itself and continue life. Most of the time (it's not THAT many though) happen after I'm doing my MAXscript stuff, cus I restart max alot during the debugging process of my script and bluescreen occasionally popup during one of them. I'm guessing it's just max 2017 wasn't that stable on Win10.

monster

@Moltar  Disabling "Improve Quality Progressively" helped me out too. But nothing made it stop. Well, except for getting a new machine. I've gone a full week without a system hang. The weird thing is that the system specs are nearly the same.

Any future readers with this problem please list your system specs and driver versions. I'm gathering information for 3ds Max developers.

monster

Another thing that helped was Run As Administrator. Only max would hang and not the entire system.

And here is a checklist from someone I was talking to about the problem:

1) Windows/Driver installation issue.
    Many of problems were gone after re-install windows or driver.
2) MultiScatter and VizPatk wall & tiles are causing problem.
3) Turning off ViewCube sovled many cases.
4) Deleting "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2017 - 64bit\ENU\plugcfg_ln\maxFxoCache.dat" was another solution.
5) Try to run as admin.
6) Win10 and 10xx/Titan/Some Quadro seems having more problems. But, there are also report with other GPU.
And comments from Alfred.DeFlaminis
"This is a crash in the ogsdevices module.  This is the biggest issue now after update1, it's had a bunch of comments today by the developers and they are working on it right now.  (I have this thread linked in the comments.)  This crash is the one I had mentioned wasn't fixed yet, and currently does affect quite a few customers.  Were you in isolation mode when you crashed?  "
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-forum/persistent-modeling-crashes-with-2017/m-p/6725313#M127049

Moltar

Update.

Ok so after endless hours testing for errors, adjusting drivers and desperately trying to convince myself that this is not a hardware fault at all, I've finally had some successes and I believe I have solved the issues completely.  Hopefully this will help others here also.

Im not sure this will work for everyone but it's worth a try before you decide to throw your cash at new hardware.

I'm now 100% certain the crashes where down to windows 10 compatibility issues with 3dsmax 2017 service pack 3.  There are several reasons why I believe windows is to blame here and I think it's mostly down to how the OS deals with conflicting software/drivers.  Please read a post I made awhile ago on how to fix crashes in Substance painter (Link below) it's a very similar instance here except there is no easy workaround and it's not directly related to the GPU.

The issues vanished once I completely removed 3dsmax from my computer using a guide from autodesk (link below). After trying multiple versions of 3dsmax and even Maya I found that 3dsmax 2016 works without crashing.

Remove 3dsmax - https://knowledge.autodesk.com/customer-service/download-install/remove-products/remove-windows-products

Fixing substance painter crashes - (http://polycount.com/discussion/167844/recommend-gpu-for-substance-painter-2#latest)

CompanionCube

out of interest what motherboard do you have?

Seenax

Hey,

I know this is an old thread, but I had the same issue with 3ds max 2017 on windows 10 with nvidia GTX 970. I managed to fix it by switching the viewport driver from Nitrous Direct3D 11 to Legacy Direct 3D or Nitrous Direct3D 9. I hope it will work for others as well.

mahmouds12

Seenax said:

Hey,

I know this is an old thread, but I had the same issue with 3ds max 2017 on windows 10 with nvidia GTX 970. I managed to fix it by switching the viewport driver from Nitrous Direct3D 11 to Legacy Direct 3D or Nitrous Direct3D 9. I hope it will work for others as well.

Thanks... worked with me 

sogun

I have an old PC with win7, 8GB RAM, GT 730:
Max2017 uses 25-30% CPU on standby, but doesn't freeze. :-O
2018 and 2019 uses 0% CPU on standby, but freezes on viewport navigation after max. 30sec. No solution posted here works. Going back to older viewport renderers only results in standby consuming 50..90% CPU resources.

Now here is the strange thing:  Maya 2018.3 doesn't freeze, works flawlessly, UI is amazing, more or less has same speed at symmetrizing+welding mid-poly objects as Max 2012 and of course has all the shiny new features.   Until I'm not buying a brand new PC,  I'm going over to Maya for the symm-weld and pathfollow functions. Also the new modeling features are amazing + the convenience UI features are staggering. Obscene user-pleasing strategy at Autodesk.. every whim and request is fulfilled, Maya is where Autodesk pays attention to support anything conceivable.

Autodesk clearly licks users arses putting every engineering resource to make Maya as perfectly pleasing and crash free as possible. OMG.   :-/     

sogun

3DSMAX 2019 Viewport freeze on editing Mouse shortcuts solved

Starting Max in VISTA compatibility mode and as admin solved the problems, strangely!  I have no more hangs, when I configure the mouse and the viewport never crashed since then.

Also to speed up Max, I'm starting it with the switch "/prefetch:1" since I currently only use its amazing shape booleans feature, so it probably boots a lots faster now.

Ghogiel

Just in case it helps anyone, when I upgraded my gpu earlier this year, I had constant max viewport lag when navigating, actually was other 3d apps suffering during viewport navigation too. Took me a while to figure it out but it was intels speedstep setting. I kept thinking it was the gpu or gpu drivers as that was the only change made to the system.

I had to turn it off in the bios so the cpu wouldn't constantly throttle back to try to use less power, for some reason the speedstep just wouldn't recognise a lot of 3d apps and clock up after the gpu upgrade. 

Jozef

same problem on home workstation/i7-7820x, Geforce GTX 1070, Asus TUF X299 Mark2, 64GB DDR4/ also on laptop/eurocom sky x9/. problem was win 10. Since I am using win 7 again - no problem. No freezing - nice life . My opinion is that best stable combination is win 7 + 3ds max 2016. 

CompanionCube

Jozef said:

same problem on home workstation/i7-7820x, Geforce GTX 1070, Asus TUF X299 Mark2, 64GB DDR4/ also on laptop/eurocom sky x9/. problem was win 10. Since I am using win 7 again - no problem. No freezing - nice life . My opinion is that best stable combination is win 7 + 3ds max 2016. 

which bios do you have for the Asus Tuf x299? latest is 1602. freezing is usually a hardware or driver/bios issue. Max triggers the issue but the fault is not max itself.