Mari just Crashes....a LOT

[Lithium (Large Lad)]

So, it's one thing that Mari can't open a simple cube made in Maya with default 0-1 UV layout and complain about too many patches, but I can't get ANY geometry to open without Mari just crashing HARD.

I'm really very interested in learning their workflow, but man, I just want the app to be stable.

[Marc Albrecht]

Hi, John,

that's sounding strange. Since a lot of people are using Mari in quite sophisticated pipelines, I am sure that opening a Maya cube in Mari usually leads to no issues whatsoever.
Also Mari - for me - has been one of the most stable programs I ever tried in the whole 3d universe. And that includes Poser2 :-)

Are you sure it isn't a graphic card issue? Mari _does_ have some pickyness about the GPU handling (it crashed for me when I accidentally had a built-in graphic chip dedicated to primary display, sure, it should not crash in such a trivial setup, but with the help of the application log it was a matter of 5-10 seconds to find the problem).

Have you contacted TheFoundry Support yet? I know, they're celebrating something right now, but Mari-support has always been very helpful for me.

Marc

[Ravi Foundry]

Hi John,

I'm sorry to hear that you are having issues creating simple projects.

I've just tested importing a cube (that was originally created and exported out of Maya) into Mari and it works fine. Could you please confirm if you have the latest graphic card drivers installed?

Also, just to be absolutely sure, can you please check if the object you are trying to import is within the 1001 UDIM (0-1 UV)?

Finally, It would be worth if you could please send us the MariIndieLog.txt from the following location:

-- Windows : C:\Users\[user_name]\Documents\Mari\Logs\MariIndieLog.txt
-- Linux/Mac : /home/[user_name]/Mari/Logs/MariIndieLog.txt

Please get back to me with the requested information and I shall investigate further for you.

Regards,
Ravi.

[Marc Albrecht]

Hi, John,

I'd be interested to learn if you were able to solve your problems (maybe with Ravi's help)?
As it stands, your thread suggests that Mari is highly unstable - and if your problems indeed did get solved, I would find leaving it at that a bit unfair to the developers ...
Since I suggest Mari (and very carefully Mari Indie) to interested third parties quite frequently, I am personally very interested in knowing about stability issues.

Marc

[Lithium (Large Lad)]

I tried and tried to get Mari to work for me, but after 3 days of it just gave up. I did contact the Foundry for support, and was told they dont support Mari, but instead I had to open a thread here. I have the most recent versions of my GPU drivers, and am running a good enough Rig (works perfect with Mudbox, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Maya, Unity, etc...).

Other people may have different results, but I'm holding fast to my original post. In my opinion, its not a workable product.

[Marc Albrecht]

Good morning, John,

that sounds rather strange indeed. I do agree that TheFoundry has to tighten up their general support structure (with maintenance, not-maintenance-but-support, support, no support, support through third parties and no seemingly no-support-for-indie-products).
So far, my personal experience with support for Mari (not Indie, though) has been very good, although a bit slow at times.

But as far as stability and compatibility goes, Mari (not Indie, that is why I am interested in this topic here) has been very stable and reliable.

There are issues, sure, e.g. Mari crashes if it detects a non-support GPU. This should never ever happen in any software. I was able to put it on the list of "well, it's a specialized tool for specialized users", but surely this may never happen with an "Indie" version.

So your feedback is most welcome. Not being able to get support from TheFoundry is a show-stopper and I am sorry to admit that I have been there myself with another of their products.

Marc

[Capt. Ace Reddick]

Hi John,

My name is Brandon and I am the MODO/MARI Indie Community Advocate and I want to apologize for any inconvenience these crashes have caused you. We do want to help you get this problem sorted if there is a system specific fix or one inside MARI Indie.

Have you emailed the log file data to Ravi yet? Just curious.

If not please email me at [e-mail]

Please send us the MariIndieLog.txt from the following location:

-- Windows : C:\Users\[user_name]\Documents\Mari\Logs\MariIndieLog.txt
-- Linux/Mac : /home/[user_name]/Mari/Logs/MariIndieLog.txt

This will give us a way to sort out whats going on.

[Lithium (Large Lad)]

Frankly I just cancelled my subscription to it.

I don't have time to play the tech support game, I need to be working on things, not fixing software packages.

May sound a bit cold on my part, but Mari apparently just isn't for me. I have plenty of other great packages like Mudbox and Substance tools which are working fine.

Best of luck to you in your endeavors to expose the masses to Mari.

[Poly_Pusher]

If you can't provide the log's could you give us your system specs? Mari in general is an incredibly stable application and if you are experiencing constant crashes we'd like to figure out where that lies. Anything you could provide us to help figure out why it is behaving this way for you would be greatly appreciated.

[Hambo]

I'm experiencing LOTS of crashes as well. Thankfully they are reproducable most of the time and as long as I avoid doing certain things, everything runs pretty smoothly. Here's a list of these things:

----
Mari starts normally, but crashes when I open ANY projects. This happens every time when I have any other graphics application like Maya or Photoshop running.
So every time I want to work with Mari, I have to close all other applications before opening my Mari project. Restarting Maya and stuff after my Mari-file has been loaded causes no issues with Mari, as far as I can tell.
----
Opening the color picker by clicking on the color-swatches on the toolbar or on procedural color layers causes a crash 90% of the time. No idea how to avoid it. I work around that by using the colors-window, which I have docked somewhere and by applying HSL adjustments to my color layers.
----
Selecting the Blur tool when I'm in UV/Otho view always results in a crash. Being in either UV or Ortho view alone works fine.
----


Very annoying stuff, but at least very predictable.

Edit:
My system specs:
AMD r9 290
Catalyst 14.12 driver
i7 3770K
16gb Ram
Win7

[Capt. Ace Reddick]

Hi Hambo,

Thank you for your feedback on this and the reproducable steps so that our QA and Devs can help figure out what is going on. We can't help users with issues they are having without this feedback, so again... thank you dude!

[davidbollman]

I recently update to the latest version of mari, hopeful that some of the issues I was experiencing were resolved also, crashing being one of the main ones. I'm very pleased to see the upping to the 6 patches as the 2 patch limit was a little too severe for me, but with that I'm happy to give it another run. I probably shouldn't post my full log here but ah why not.

The post is from a freshly created modo file - very simple cube, and then I saved as fbx 2013, and then imported into mari with default settings, nothing changed.
System is win7, 7870 graphics card, i7 2600, 16 gb ram.
all my steam stuff is installed under the skyrim folder - little mistake when I first setup steam - ah well;
The fbx I was importing was cube.fbx
if you'd like, please post me an email and I would be happy to send you the fbx file I was using to cause it. There may be a reference to spaceshuttle_awful.fbx, that crashes also, but was a larger geometry, the cube really is just a cube and nothing else.

Many thanks,
David

I tried to post the log but there is a 1000 char limit, would you be able to recommend an email address that I could send it and the fbx to?

Thanks again
David

[davidbollman]

I thought I'd post the 2 links here if someone would like to give them a whirl,
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26334029/MariIndieLog.txt
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26334029/cube.fbx

the cube does crash instantly, I did have a 0-1000 uv issue, I scaled it back just incase it was the issue but it still crashed.

Thanks all,
David

[Gamby]

Hey David and John. I just tried downloading your cube.fbx and received an error 500 from dropbox so I was not able to test/reproduce your crash.

By no means am I a fanboi or anything like that. I always believed in using whatever tools you have access to for the job. I'm also learning Mari myself. It really is a shame that you guys are having issues with it. I have almost 40 hours logged in Mari so far and to my knowledge has only crashed twice. Both times were right in the beginning when I furiously was opening/closing scenes and clicking on buttons all over the place because I didn't know WTF I was doing. It has been incredibly stable for me. So much so that it has been an absolute blast learning this software.

I truly believe Mari must be a very finicky application for hardware. Right now i'm running a gtx970, i7, 16gb ram and a SSD. (from what I understand, an SSD is essential for speed in using mari.)

I also own Substance Painter which I really haven't put the time into yet to give an honest opinion about. I know it's an amazing application and I can't wait to start learning that also. The odd thing for me is that substance painter was the app that crashed alot /laggy for me. With so many different variables (video card, ram, ssd, drivers) it can be hard to nail down exactly why things crash.

I know the last bit of what I wrote is ultimately no help, but it just goes to show that some people just can have unfortunate luck with anything. Can't say that I would blame either of you for ending your subscriptions. Hell, I'd do the same. It's just a shame though. I'm absolutely loving Mari (so far)

[davidbollman]

I tried deleting mari from steam today and redownloaded it, and my cube that I posted above that failed previously (and that I tried 2 days ago and still failed) works now (yay :D ). Hopefully it keeps working (I did do a reboot inbetween but I've tried that previously also). I stopped some other programs after startup (origin, amd gaming evolved are the only 2 I can think of at the moment).
I'm quite happy now that I think I'll be able to use both modo & mari. Hopefully this helps someone else with their crashing problems also :).

[bainicovi]

super helpful tips @Hambo - the one using other program seems to do it for me (for instance I had Dota2 open while trying some textures and Mari stalled with a simple operation)