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Hi All,

Was searching the net looking for experienced Viz users and additional help with this product due to some major problems we have been having.

I am the IT support guy and I don't know that much about Viz but our concept guy has been having major problems with it.
As a whole we have been using Viz for quite some time, well over 5 years but since we upgraded to Viz 4 early last year its been a nightmare.

We have 3 types of crashes I am trying to resolve on 2 identical design machines.

System's are Windows 2000 Pro, SP4 fully patched. Dual Xeon 2.4ghz on an Intel Server board, 1gb ram, 80GB hard disk with a Nvidia Quadro FX 2000 graphics card.

Crash #1. Sometimes when opening AutoCAD 2004 files system will crash and cause a debug. This problem is documented on Autodesk's website and we are currently testing the suggested fix.

Crash #2. When opening up an existing scene and re-rendering it choosing to save over the existing file will cause the system to crash to the desktop, no event log, bsod or dr watson logs, Viz just closes back to the desktop.
There are other people who have reported this on the Viz discussion forums but no solution has been presented, we currently work around this by not overwriting existing files. Existing files are not read protected.

Crash #3. This is the most serious and annoying and happens in general modelling, the designer will simply be creating a scene and the system will crash, exactly as Crash 2 with no errors reported anywhere. Most recently after following some suggestions from the Viz forums it crashed when bringing in a camera, if he tries it again it works, he reports that it could be anything that hes working on, sometimes it will be fine other times it just crashes and he has to recreate the work, usually once recreating its fine it's that inconsistant.

After reading the Viz forums at Autodesk many people reported similar problems, most noticbly with Nvidia Quadro card's and suggested changing from OpenGL to Heidi which seem to fix most people's problems but not ours
I have tried a number of different drivers to no avail we have even clean installed Windows again with no luck.

Has anyone got any advice on what we should next do? I am looking at disabling the Quadro and trying onboard graphics but its a bit extreme considering these cards were meant to do a job.
I am also considering installing on a spare machine to try and see if its a problem with our work or the hardware.

Just looking for some advice from people who use this software on a regular basis and maybe if someone has experienced similar problems.

Dibbers

I take it that you have Viz 4 SP2 installed.

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Yes

ronel

if your looking for viz forum site try vizdepot.com

actually im using viz 4 for a quite years ago. my sytem, windows xp pentium 4 and i found out that the causes of crashing problems are the following.

1. graphics card- you have to installed a good graphics card
2. viz 4 cant support open gl, it cause a system crash specially when you render a complex scene. so you have to configure the viz driver to heidi.
3. another thing is the way your designer setup the rendering process. there is some settings that make the viz to crash. so your designer must check it out. rendering size, too much raytracing, system filing and linking and the proper support file locations. Do some rendering test from small resolution to higher and observe where your sytem fits in.
4. try to uninstalled the software, clean all its registry in the regedit area. clear all its parameters and installed it again. sometimes it the best way and best things you can do.

D.B.

Interesting!

I had the same problems with Viz 4 crashing. I'd been using Viz from version1, and noticed that it kept getting a little more unstable with each new issue. Viz 3 crashes were predictable, but not so with V4.

My solution......I uninstalled Viz....and bought Cinema 4d.

D.B.