3DS MAX LOG disappears

[kitten]

3DS MAX is failing with exit code 3.  MAX render appears for less than a second and the LOG file in the temp folder appears for less than a second and then is erased.  If MAX hangs then the log file is there until the 3dsmax process is killed in Task Manager.  How do I get the LOG file to persist and not be erased when the render exits?

[shinya]

Hi kitten,

The contents of the logfile in the temp folder will be dumped to the "standard out" log of the job, when the job exists, before being deleted. 

You *could* edit the execute.pm file found in the jobtypes/3dsmax/ folder and comment out the part the removes the log, but you really shouldn't need to, as the contents are in the stdout log.

[kitten]

That may be true in an ideal world, but when errors and crashes are involved there is more to the story.  3DS MAX was crashing.  It was a hard crash, unresponsive and not recoverable.  When the 3dsmax process was killed in Task Manager the LOG file disappears.  The StdOut file stops before the crash and gives no useful info.  I discovered that the LOG file could be read while 3DS MAX was hung and that gave the crash error info which was not in StdOut.  I had to open it before killing the process.  In the case of crash, StdOut does not match LOG data. 

[shinya]

Hmmm... that's strange, because the process that deletes the temporary log file is the same exact process that reads the contents from it and writes it into the stdout log. 

In any case, yes, there's nothing that stops you from opening the LOG file before killing the job or the job process.  You could also copy it to a different file if you need to keep it, even after you kill the job.