Cineware by maxon add-on has unexpectedly closed. - Windows, all Archicad versions - Solution

[concepsys]

When opening rendering settings or starting render directly, Archicad would wait for about 5 minutes and then opened a message saying "Cineware by maxon add-on has unexpectedly closed". Even in a new empty file.

 

This was happening both in Archicad 26 & 29, the version I have installed at the moment.

After spending a few hours searching online for occurrences of this problem and possible solutions, none of them seemed to work.

• I switched the NVIDIA drivers from Game Ready to Studio,

• installed the C++ Redistributable x64 and x32,

• assigned Archicad and Cinerender directly to the RTX GPU to prevent them from using the onboard Intel.

I tried everything I found, and nothing worked.

Eventually, I went into Archicad’s Cineware folder and ran the cinerender.exe executable. A message appeared saying that the file libmmd.dll was missing. However, that file actually exists a few folders deeper… in /resource/libs/x64.

I copied that file from /resource/libs/x64 into the Cineware folder — basically placing the DLL right next to Cinerender.exe — and it started working. I had to do this for both version 26 and version 29, but it immediately worked in both cases.

It must be a rare issue because it only happened on my laptop. A system path issue, probably.

On my desktop PC, for example, it doesn’t occur. Still, here's the solution that quickly worked for me.

I hope it helps someone else.

[Andreas81ch]

I had the same issue.

Told this to our Swiss partner IDC, they sent me a new Cineware folder with files (to change the old Cineware folder with the new one).

Then it worked again.