3ds 9 : "Error Creating Bitmap"

Miguelito

Hi there,

today is one of those days where I could just eat up my keyboard!
I'm trying to bake a texture out in tga format (because I want that alpha) but it simply doesnt work. I just get a message : "error creating bitmap". GRRRRRRRRRRRR
The thing is that it works with a simple bmp but not with tga. the last time i used it was two weeks ago and i dont know what I could have changed...
now i have no fucking idea why it wont work. i have done this thing a 1000 times before and i am really stuck here!

Anyone who knows a solution?!

rooster

this happened to me a bunch of times in the dom war.. I don't know what causes it but it seemed to happen when I was getting close to the limits of how dense a mesh my computer could handle. when it happened a restart usually did the trick. try simplifying your mesh as a test and see if it still happens?

edit: if its happening in the exact same situation/files as last week though.. weird

Miguelito

I already tried it in a new file with simple stuff - same result! My hiresmesh isnt that complex anyway so reaching the limits actually cant be the reason.

Thx though (I'm already eating the corners of my keyboard)!

Noren

Hi,

perhaps it's the size of the map ?
Dimensions above 2048 cause problems.

If that is the case you can try to increase the memory that is reserved for maxscript in the preferences and try to free as much ram as possible. I can rtt maps up to 3k, no luck above.

You could try to render to tiff,rla,png or another imageformat with alpha or try to set up a different passes for your masks, though it's a pita.

thomasp

check which UV channel you're rendering into. and make sure that none of your objects is set to non-renderable (properties-page).

Psyk0

Hmm i also had this problem, map was 2048x1024, worked on first test and then later gave me the finga. I saved to different paths, changed file format and seemed to work randomly.

Jesse Moody

i have had this problem a lot lately. for work i have had to do some 4096x4096 stuff and when i kicked out the normal and ao maps at the same time it would give me the errors but when i did each seperately than i didn't have problems. Just slow as hell for the ao maps when they are that big.

tremulant

Try to things .

1) Convert your mesh to Edit mesh, or at least put a edit mesh mod on top of it..

2) Reset Xform, for some reason that always works...

Mark Dygert

When Max crashes and it says; "attempting to save a copy of the scene, this file maybe corrupt". Then send off a hate mail "bug-report" to Autodesk. Then you open the file it attempted to save and everything looks ok so you press on. Guess what its royally messed up on the back end. You're better off going to a previous save or an autoback file.

Having to do a few min-hrs work over is nothing compared to the slow down, GIANORMOUS file size of that corrupt max file.

Things you can to do uncorrupt the file:
- Clear the back end baggage off an object. The quickest way is to create a primitive, convert it to E-Poly and attach your beaten and bloodied mesh to it, your mesh becomes part of the box object not the other way around. Then delete the box and reset your pivot point and xform.
- To really clear out the baggage (and possibly mess up your mesh) Export the mesh as .OBJ or some other file format and import them into a new file. You'll have to set up your materials again but who cares your file no crashy no more. Max carries around quite a bit of back end baggage. Don't believe me? Have you ever imported a mesh and half the polys are facing the wrong way? Yeah thats because Max remembers its original un-mirrored/flipped position and which way the normals where facing along with bunch of other crap, like that 2,000 poly AC unit was a box 3 weeks ago and how many booleans you butchered into it. Max just needs to learn when to let go...
- Watch out for crazy work flows and long modifier history stacks.
- Don't bury your textures really deep inside of folders. Max likes to have textures close and its enemies (you) closer. Use the Asset Browser to set the path of your textures if you have a lot of them to repath. File > Asset Browser.
- If you have an "ok" video card run in software mode. Yeah yeah DirectX is the wave of the FUTURE! BUT Vig I'm too cool for that shit I don't play games if they have a software mode! DirectX makes max twitchy on certain cards with certain drivers so unless you really need it don't use it. They give you the option of 3 rendering modes, why not pick the best one? If you need it for shaders and what not you can spend the 2 weeks building in the safety of software mode and switch over to twitch bitch mode when you have to...

Lastly, they just released SP1 for Max9, and it comes with a "opps we broke it" disclaimer. I bet the patch it soon because just about everyone I work with has gotten this exact same error and had pretty buggy issues. A few have gone back to 8 until they address the issues, I'm close... All the "optimizing" to make it "faster" left everyone twisting in the wind. Hopefully they'll break it good, and be forced to rebuild it from the ground up.

Miguelito

Thx for all the tips! I look into all of them during lunch time but right now i have an internal plugin of our studio under suspicion which lets you export into another format. I already asked politely one of our programmers with a shotgun in his neck to look into that!
Stay tuned!

FAT_CAP

In my experience it is- like other people have mentioned- when MAX is running out of memory... usually happens when I try and render 4096x4096 textures or have been outputting a lot of 2048x2048 textures in a row. A reset, and a consequently freeing of memory usually does the trick for me.

Miguelito

Update:
So indeed the problem was caused by a modified psd.bmi!
I already shot the responsible person...
Thx though for the help. Somehow I think that I will need those tips later sometime