If you have used 3ds max of after effects in production, you have had it stall or crash. Sometimes even the crash can crash its crashing, and you end up with tasks running, that you have to go through the task manager to kill. Sometimes going to the process, or process tree and terminating that. And then waiting for windows to politely quit the program, asking you if you really want to do that. Sometimes you need to do this process multiple times a day, and just get fed up with it. Well here is the solution I have. .bat files that just cut to the chase and stop the program.
You may or may not know what a .bat file is. It is an executable script that can be saved as file, and run in windows. I have mine saved to a folder, that I pinned to my taskbar called ‘batlaunch’ and can access the ones I use most often from there.
As you can see from the image, the script is pretty short, and really clear on what it does. It will simply force kill the task, right then and there. This will kill all instances of a running program, so be aware if you have multiple consoles of 3ds Max running, it will stop them all. But this can be handy too! If you are running AE in multi-processing mode, and it decides to crash, chances are that you have a bunch of background process running, one for each core that was rendering. If you try to start AE back up it will try and kill off each of those processes 1 at a time, each time you launch. So you could be stuck pressing to launch After effects multiple times, and wondering why won’t after effects launch. Just run this and all of them will die at once.
To get them, dowload the bat files here:
www.aarondabelow.com/v1/scripts/task_kill/kill_AfterEffects.zip
www.aarondabelow.com/v1/scripts/task_kill/kill_3dsMax.zip
Or just re-create the files from what you see in the image, that is all there is to them.