3ds Max 2019 OSL and BackBurner (network rendering) bug - FIXED



3ds Max 2019 Update 1 introduced an unfortunate bug; if you tried to run a network render, or a command line rendering job, and your scene contained OSL shaders, it would not work.

And sadly, the bug came to our attention just a tiny bit too late to make it into Update 2 (please report these things immediately ... waiting to tell us, or assume we magically know through mind reading, are bad ideas).

But it's fixed in Update 3.

The bug enough was of course trivial, our new code to convert OSL to HLSL (see previous post for details) made some assumptions about the viewport graphics subsystem being up and running... which it isn't in command line rendering. So the compilation step of an OSL shader was trying to hand it off to the viewport code, and the viewport code was asleep, taking the day off, and a NULL pointer crash ensued.

I'm terribly sorry for any problems this must have caused, but this is now fixed in 2019 Update 3

But I have to stress the importance of reporting bugs. Some people have this tendency to just assume a bug is known. Many times this scenario has happened.


  • Me: "Woohoo, we released version X"
  • User: "Oh cool, did you fix that bug Q?"
  • Me: "The what now?"
  • User: "That Q bug, everybody knows, you do A with the B and then Q!"
  • Me: "I literally never heard of this until now"
  • User: "Come on, everybody knows about this bug"
Don't assume we know. Tell us. And then tell us again. We have people who's job it is to dereference duplicate bug reports, humans can do that. We do not have people that read minds, or scurry every forum on the planet where a bug "everybody knows" is discussed.
  • Report bugs
  • Report them again
  • Most importantly, if a release comes out with your bug not fixed, DEFINITELY report it again.
  • Also, send in your CER's (Crash Error Reports), yes that thing that shows up when things go awry
  • ...and when you do, fill in your email
  • ...and tell us if it's okay to contact you for details (GDPR and all that)
  • ...and try to type at least a coherent statement of what happened. :)
Thank you. We really try to fix things... but we have to know about them to do so....



/Z

Comments

Popular Posts