Character Animator Start up Crash 4-27-17

[jerryvip]

I am having a problem with Character Animator crashing on start up. I will go to load the app, both regular or as admin and instantly after the load screen it crashes.

Windows 10 64 bit

Nvidia Quadro K620

All my other software works correctly as far as what I use in the Adobe Suite. I've updated my graphics driver. At this point I do not have a microphone or camera hooked up or available to me. I would not think that should cause problems, I plan to get those after I explore about the program a bit. I've created a zip file that contains all the data I could get my hands on in regard to this problem. The only thing I could not generate was the crashdump report, but I included some Event Viewer files. I hope you can help me solve this conundrum, Id really like to start exploring and making cool things with Character Animator.

Here is a link to the zip file

Dropbox - CharacterAnimator_VIP-Crash Files.zip

[oksamurai]

Thanks for the info. Do any of these threads help?:

Character Animator Beta 5 crashes on start up Win 10 64bit

[jerryvip]

Hey, love your videos. I found the other threads before I posted mine. One guy responded his issue fixed itself. The others were having license issue, I never got that error message. Basically the program starts, whether I load it up with a character, load it up holding down the shift key, open it as an admin. Every Time it just crashes, it doesn't hang up or freeze or get an spinning circle ( ie hour glass) even when everything looks like its fine. Its like the program just puts up the message "stop responding" and dies. If I'm fast enough and click on one of the puppets it will start to load and then still it crashes as its loading the character.

Re: Character Animator crashing on launch for anyone else?

  - I wasn't getting a license error on launch.

Re: Abobe Character Animator won't launch: Licensing error

- No license error message

Re: Character Animator Freezing & Corrupting Project

- I haven't even got the program to stay open long enough to get a freeze.

Character Animator (preview 4) freezes at launch

- Again mine just crashes even though it never freezes or hangs up.

[oksamurai]

Gotcha, thanks - let me ask the team and see if they have any more advice.

[DanTull]

I'm not sure how comfortable you'd be with using regedit, but here's information on how to configure saving crash dump files automatically for crashes: Collecting User-Mode Dumps (Windows)

Note that full dumps can be quite large and mini dumps are usually enough to get some diagnostic ideas about what is happening. A full dump for a crash at startup won't be quite as unwieldy as a crash after an app has been running for a while and has more data loaded into its memory space, but a mini dump is usually small enough to fit with in forum/email attachment limits.

Anyway, just thought I'd mention it because a crash dump here might help shed some light on what is going on.

Thanks -- Dan Tull

[jerryvip]

Jeff : I looked in (in AppData\Local\Temp\) and didn't see anything in that folder. The first location I was supposed to look I think was AppData\Local\CrashDumps, which didn't have anything as I said. But would this .dmp file be just in the Temp folder by itself or within another folder in the temp folder?

More PC Specs :

This PC is a Dell Precision Tower 5810 BTX

has a Intel Xeon E5 V3 Haswell-E

The PC has no camera, and no mic on it at this moment.

Dan : I clicked that link and looked into the regedit, but when I go to that section I dont see an section with "LocalDump"

[jerryvip]

Ok update, (for crash dump file) After doing more research I see what that link was about. I needed to create that folder in the regedit along with the other info. I created the folder, and was able to save the Character Animator Crash file (.dmp) its 2mb (16 unzipped) Its a mini dump.

Dropbox - Character Animator.exe.9692.zip

Hope this helps

[DanTull]

Excellent. I'll take a look and see if it gives me some solid clues on what's going wrong.

Thanks! -- DT

[DanTull · Accepted solution]

Ok, with symbols loaded, it does look like it is down in the code that attempts to select a camera to use. I'd expect that'd just do nothing with no camera attached. I have used a Windows system with no camera without a crash on launch, but it also isn't a common scenario on test machines and there's apparently a missing NULL check somewhere down in that code path.

One thing we could try is to tweak the app prefs to turn off the camera entirely and see if that gets us started up.

If you put the attached file named AppPrefs.xml in this location (this should auto expand in explorer):

%APPDATA%\Adobe\Character Animator\Beta

It should disable your camera and microphone. If I'm right about what the dump file indicates, that should mean Ch will start without crashing at least.

Dan Tull

[jerryvip]

Good news, this worked! I guess the other answer would have been get a camera and try it. But its nice to know that this issue has been resolved. Thanks again Dan. Thanks everyone else too for your help as well.

[Jeff Almasol]

Thanks for those files. A .dmp file would be more helpful, but sounds like it didn't create one (in AppData\Local\Temp\)?

No webcam should be ok, but Character does need audio working. Do you have working audio playback in any app?

Is the CPU in the machine Intel or AMD?

If you hold down the Shift or Alt key while the application is launching, does it make any difference?

Thanks.