Hey i Need help with any one who works with 3D studio max... My Specs are P4 128 MB RDRAM GeForce2 32MB I am a college student, who is trying to learn how to use 3D Studio max, and bought a book entitled "3ds Max 4 Media Animation", by John P. Chismar... I was doing the first example where we make a billboard for an entertainment ride named Funhouse... Well i follow it all the way, until it comes time for me to have a look what my 13 second animation looks like... However i need to add a fiery glow effect along the edge of the billboard... so i do as the book mentions, and these are the steps in short: 1. Select the desired object to have this fiery effect (In this case, the bilboard, and a bunch of clown objects) and change their Properties->G-Buffer->Object Channel to 1... This way you can assign the Fiery effect to all objects with Channel 1. 2. Open Video Post (Once Video Post is open, i have nothing in queue) 3. Add a scene event... And leave default options... (In this i use my custom Camera for the job, which is what is asked). 4. Add a Image Filter Event and choose Lens effect glow and click Okay. 5. Move the time slider to frame 90... (Total of 390 or 391 frame). 6. Then in the Video Post dialog, Double Click the Lens Effects Glow Queue and choose setup. 7. Press the VP Queue button, so as to see the effects through the custom camera. 8. Press preview and watch the effect occur. 9. (I Change the settings as explained in the book). 10. And then after all done, click OK to close the Lens Effects Glow Dialog box. 11. Now he says take a break and render the animation to see what you have done so far. (In the next chapter he explains that you can only see the Flame glow if you render the animation through Video Post). 12. So i choose Add Image Output Event Button and then choose where i wish to save the file and what type of format and compression i wish to use. (I choosed MS Video 1 with 90 compression, as suggested in the book). 13. Then i click okay and then excecute, and choose what frames and what size the video should be. I choose 0 to 390 as frames, and make the video 320 x 240, as suggested. Then i click render, and then i get this error message......... An Error has occured and the application will now close. Would you like to save a copy of this scene? If i click okay, it shuts down 3ds Max, after saving a copy of the scene in the backup folder, if i click cancel it just exits. Now i thought maybe there is some bad installation, so i reinstalled the software. Then i tried it again, and the same problem. Then i tried different formats, and compressions in Step 12, to see wether it was a video problem. But nothing works. Then i tried another thing. I repeated all the above steps, but never did add the Fiery glow. So basically skipped steps 4 to 10. And then i excecuted render, and it saves. So if i add the fiery glow it fails, if the Image filter event is not added, it works fine. I tried to add another Image filter event, like the Starfield and fade... and all those work... It just seems Lens effect glow is not working. His book came with a CD, and for each project, there were 30 max scenes progressively saved from start to finish of the project. I loaded up his save at that point and tried to render through video post, and the same error occured. Please someone help me to solve the problem. I cant seem to render it with the glow imafe filter. Thanks to everyone in advance... i know it must have been a pain to read this, but i need help... Thanks again...

The world famous "and error occured" message

I did a quick test myself, did what you wrote in your post, and i didn''t get this error.

- after reinstalling, did you use the same old scene again? Often the files are corrupt not max itself. If not then create the scene again see if it still crashes.

- you can add glow not only with object ID, but also with the effect ID.
When you''re in the material editor select the material you added to the billboard. Click on the button called "Material Effects ID" (it has a blue 1 on it), choose a number.
In the Properties section of the glow filter, choose effect ID instead of object ID and make you''re you enter the same number there you''ve chosen in the material editor. Try to render it, maybe it works.

- If a file is corrupt (can happen after max crashed) you can try to merge it (or some parts) into another scene, sometimes the error is gone then.