CompuServe Messages

"1. Bad MTL Num in Do_smooth" "2. Pentiums continually hang in transforming objects." Hi Earl, you've got a few problems that may be resolved by a clean boot. The Transforming objects hang is something we've encountered before, and sounds like you're booting with a POWER.EXE line in your CONFIG.SYS. If not – the culprit may be some other "green" feature of your computer. That first error though is not as familiar. Can you render any of our sample .3DS files? Or does this error come only with a particular file, no matter which machine it's rendered on? It might be a corrupted file. The "MTL" refers to Material, and it looks as though it's having trouble being applied because of some illegal condition for a smoothing group. Have you been adjusting smoothing groups on this model? Hopefully you can narrow down your problem to a specific piece of geometry and remedy the situation. "3. Flic files almost always render corrupted when the machines do decide to finish rendering." If you follow the clean boot above (also, you might be interested in our FAX Information doc "Clean Booting with 3D Studio" – call 415/507-5595. It's document # 823) you should also run CHKDSK /F or SCANDISK before starting 3D Studio. Check for Lost Allocation Units or other corruptions, and correct them. Also, make a note of disk space. If you have Flic problems, they can sometimes be related to disk space. A High Palette setting can eat up a lot of disk space. So try rendering a small test flic, low palette. If the corruption doesn't seem to be related to disk space, I'm not sure what to suggest. Make sure you have the latest Vibrant drivers, make sure you aren't paging to disk, make sure your swap file is directed to the right (most available space) drive. Again, plain boot, try a sample like Aquarium.3DS. "4. Pentiums continually hang when counting colors with any palatte setting." The way you've phrased these problems makes me think you're suspicious of the Pentiums. You might be right. Disable all the advanced features in CMOS (like cache) and see if your tests now work. There is nothing specifically wrong with Pentiums that we know about. There are reports of specific machines that fail when the manufacturer tries to duplicate the acustomer's problem. Let us know the latest.