known memory leaks in 3ds max?

Question

I've set up a script in 3ds max to render a bunch of animations into frames. To do this, I open up a file with all of the materials, load an animation (as a bip) onto the figure, then render.

We were seeing a problem where eventually the script would fail because it was unable to open the next file-- max had consumed all of the system memory. Closing max, of course, freed the memory, and we were able to continue with the script.

I checked out the heapfree variable, hoping to see a memory leak within my script, hoping to see a memory leak within my own (maxscript) code-- but the amount of free space was the same after every animation.

Then, it must be 3ds max which is consuming all of that memory. Nothing in max need be saved from animation to animation-- is there some way to get max to free that memory? (I've tried resetMaxFile() and manually deleting all of the objects in the scene). Is there any known sets of operations that cause max to grow out of control?

Answer 1

The first line of questioning needs to be, do you have any locally-created plugins loaded? Could they be leaking memory?

I haven't worked with 3dsmax since version 5 but I don't remember any particular memory leaks that were problematic. However, I seem to recall (from others' experiences) that batch operations needed to restart MAX from time to time just to keep things sane. E.g. break up your batch job into smaller sets of work and call them sequentially. However, the stuff we were doing in MAX5 didn't need such kludges. YMMV of course. ;)

Autodesk has the Autodesk Developer Network, also; that's a great resource and not too much cash if your company is serious about its use of 3DS.