Substance Designer is crashing every 5 minutes

[Sean_AP]

Dear Community,

I have been using Substance Designer for a few weeks now and the program is supposed to become an integral part of my workflow. However, I can't work with it for 5 minutes without the application crashing. There is also no system behind it, so it can happen that the program crashes at any kind of operation. Best crash so far yesterday, when there was a crash when clicking the cancel button of the crash report popup!!!

Do you also experience this? Is the software an absolute disaster and you are only using it due to a lack of alternatives or could the problem be on my (system/hardware) side? Just in advance, I have all drivers of graphics card & Co up to date and use Windows 11 with an Geforce 4070. Thanks for any response, because I am honestly a bit desperate because I wonder how I should work with it and build a business workflow on it if it is such an absolutely disastrous experience to work with it...

[Marco Vitale]

Hey Sean,

I'm really sorry to hear that you experience such a behavior of Designer, in my experience it is quite robust and crashes very little, so the problem is most likely not the Software itself.

I'm not a technical support person, but I'll try to give you some ideas, what to try so you may find the problem.

First of all, send the crash reports to Adobe whenever you can, they are usually very quick with analyzing them and find a solution.

In the meantime here are some things, which let Designer crash in my experience:

• Python Plugins can make the Software instable, due to flaws in the scripts, which can't be handled by the software, so try to deactivate all plugins in the plugin manager.
• Substance Designer can be very heavy on the GPU, there may be some driver issues or other problems using the GPU, so maybe try closing the 3D view, and switch to the CPU Engine in the preferences.
• Another problem maybe a corrupted installation, did you try to uninstall and reinstall the Software?

These are my best guesses, but as I said, I'm not technical support, these are just points from my experience, which may help you with finding the problem.

Stay healthy and creative Marco 

[Sean_AP]

Hey Marco

Thank you very much for your reply. I already expected that the software in general can't be that bad. It actually seems to get better when I disable the GPU features and the only python addon that was enabled by default. It's still frustrating to not understand the exact reason on a brand new high-end laptop, but at least I was able to work for hours yesterday without crashing.

[Marco Vitale]

I'm glad it helped a little,

this sounds to me, like a GPU driver issue, did you try to activate the plugin again? Did it make any difference?

You should reach out to Adobe Substance Tech Support, which may have a more specific diagnosis.

Which GPU-Driver did you install? The Nvidia Game-Ready or the Studio-Driver package? I suggest give the Studio-Driver Package a try and activate GPU-Features again.

Stay healthy and creative Marco

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello Sean,

Thank you for reporting these crashes and for your patience throughout. Thank also to @Marco Vitale for their thoughtful advice.

I have reviewed the crash logs and can suggest trying two troubleshooting steps:

1. Try running Designer with no external display.
2. Check you laptop's power management settings, and make sure it is configured for the best performance. Also look for third-party software which enforce a power management plan. These are common on gaming-oriented systems (E.g., ASUS Armoury Crate for ASUS gaming laptops). Again, adjust setting for best performance.

Please let me know any of these adjustments helped improve Designer' stability.

Best regards.

[Sean_AP]

Hi Luca,

thank you for your reply. I think I tried all recommendations, but also with no external dispaly designer still crashes regularly. Since I disabled some GPU features and disabled the python plugin I had the feeling it could be a bit better, but am not really sure. It is still not possible for me to work more than 20min without a crash. Will try to use another and even stronger machine these days, will give an update if it seems to be an individual issue with my laptop or not.

[Sean_AP]

Dear Luca,

I tested now a lot and its definitely not possible to find a correlation between any settings or external display use or usage behavior (Its not crashing while doing specific things, it happens totally random while working normally, switching between graphs or using a slider). What I found though is, that it depends on the number of substance graphs in my package. As soon as the package gets bigger (more graphs, more complex graphs) it starts getting more and more unstable up to a point where I cannot use it anymore because its crashing, as the title of the post says, within minutes of working time.

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello @Sean_AP,

Again, thank you for your patience. I have reviewed the new crash reports you sent since writing your most recent message in this thread and discussed them with a few engineers. We would like to know if making adjustments to the auto-save feature impact the frequency of the crashes.

You can adjust these settings in Designer by going to 'Edit > Preferences > General' and locating the 'Auto-save' item. We want to confirm or refute a possible correlation:

• Does lowering the auto-save period result in more frequent crashes?
• Does extending the auto-save period result in less frequent crashes?
• Does disabling the auto-save stop or considerably lower the occurrence of crashes?

Best regards.

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello @Sean_AP,

I have received your crash reports with auto-save on and off. Thank you for taking the time to check that.

After further analysis of the crash dumps, the crash appears to be caused by an error in Qt (Designer's user interface system) while processing an SVG image.

Are you working on a project which involves SVG resources?

Also, if possible please share the SBS file you were working on when the crash happened. In Designer's Explorer, right-click on the package and select 'Export with dependencies' to proceed with a packaged export.

Share the output folder as a ZIP file through a reliable file transfer service such as WeTransfer. Feel free to send me a link through a direct message if you do not wish to share files publicly.

Ideally, please also include a screen recording which demonstrates the crash occurring.

Best regards.

[Sean_AP]

Dear Luca,

Thank you for your efforts to help. I have no idea how to send you a direct
message, but I have uploaded a folder to our Gdrive. If you click on the
link below, you can request access to the data. Since I don't have an
e-mail address, I will have to activate the access manually, so it might
take a while before you can download the file. You should be notified when
you have access.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/164bijBdy936t-YdGOUJyatuXRYzst4tY/view?usp=sharing

The folder contains the desired sbs export and two screencasts. I chose the
package that usually crashes the fastest, which can also be seen in the
video. I have the feeling that the time between crashes is inversely
proportional to the complexity of the graphs. I don't use svg files
anywhere, at least not to my knowledge.


Best regards
Sven Wanner