I think it’s very interesting what you said about the undo function. For me the new undo system is one of the big suspects. As far as I know it has been completely rewritten for 2.83. And I read that someone somewhere somehow recommended to use the old legacy undo if there are corrupt files and crashes. Unfortunately I don’t remember on what forum that was.
I’m a bit puzzled though, that the devs did not mention this, when I explained my issues in a bug report. They are the only ones who could understand, or at least guess, what processes in the background could cause such issues.
I wanted to test 2.83 with the legacy undo active (under ‘experimental’ in preferences). But I simply do not have the time for tests at the moment. I’m back on 2.82 and really appreciate that I don’t have to expect a crash every time I activate a collection or an object.
I don’t use a Wacom display, by the way. I use an additional display for my iMacPro. But I have the same issues on my Macbook while only using the built in screen.
Well, I had one crash, possibly two–seemingly random. Then I re-enabled Global Undo, because the undo behavior was weird without it anyway. Hours later, I had a third crash when hitting undo during a decimate, but it didn’t crash when I tried it again. Had another crash when I deleted an object, then hit undo. It might be crashing less than it was, but still not as stable as 2.82 was.
Yeah, it seems like they’re mostly undo related, although one of the crashes earlier today happened while I was just selecting some edges. Maybe I hit undo without realizing. I’ll try to continue keeping track of when they happen.
The problems mentioned above are much bigger:
Versions newer than 2.82 can create objects, collections or even entire project files which are corrupt and instantly create crashes when selected or loaded.
I signed up here just to add my input. I’m so glad it’s not just me.
My experience: MacOS Mojave 10.14.6, 15 inch 2018 MacBook Pro.
Up to and including 2.83 Blender was very stable and very rarely crashed.
After upgrading to 2.90 and now 2.90.1 it crashes randomly and routinely, with multiple projects.
It’s very difficult to pin down any single cause, I suspect because the crash is due to corruption that happened sometime before, so like others have said It’s hard to submit a concrete bug report.
It does seem to be specific projects that crash, again suggesting corrupted files.
It is quite frustrating that it seems almost impossible to track down these crashes, as the Blender devs will not investigate without a clear description how to reproduce them.
My hope is to get more users reporting here, so at some point it will be obvious for the blender foundation, that there really is something wrong with the latest Mac versions.
In the end the devs have a much higher chance to guess what might cause these problems. (The new undo system is one possible suspect we have. But we’re not sure.)
So thanks a lot for signing up to BA and reporting your issues. This is very helpful.
On Catalina I noticed problems already with 2.83, by the way. That’s why I’m only using 2.82 now. Really miss the adaptive sampling!!
Looking at the Command Line Arguments docs there are various debugging options, like --debug-memory and even just --debug, I think I’ll persevere but run from the cli with those options enabled. If I can catch it as it happens I have a better chance of submitting a reproduce-able report. No promises I’ll find anything though.
Hi all, I have this exact same problem. I’ll be working on a project and Blender crashes.
I try to re-open the file - instant crash.
I go through version history of file on Dropbox (very handy) and eventually find an older file that will open but I will have lost perhaps 2-3 hrs work - it’s totally random.
The initial crash seems to occur when I am undoing or redoing. The worst part of this is that it seems so totally random in terms of which version I have to go back to to get it working again that it makes it hard to pinpoint the cause. I wouldn’t mind the occasional crash if you only lost the work up to the previous save (or auto save) but to lose half a days work so randomly is really frustrating!
Looking through this thread there seems to be an common Undo theme…
Here’s my Prefs for Undo/Memory - is there a way to increase available memory? I’ve got 32GB of RAM so plenty available!!
A thought - could having limited Undo Memory Limit (0) be an issue? Could memory fill up and cause a crash?
These are exactly the same problems I had. Although I sometimes noticed Blender only crashing when I tried to activate a (before muted) collection or object. Guess when an active object gets corrupted then Blender will crash instantly after reopening that file.
For me it also seems completely random which and why objects (meshes) get corrupted. I suspect the undo system could have something to do with it, but I wouldn’t know how. And I wouldn’t know if the undo memory limit could have an influence. It would need someone who really knows how the new undo system works to judge this.
When working with 2.90 (and 2.83) I was saving new versions of my blender project every 15 minutes. Which got me into hundreds of project files. This way I never lost too much work but it was still a pain, since I sometimes only discovered a corrupted mesh hours after it happened. So I constantly had to replace corrupted meshes (once discovered) with older versions of this object, which I had to search for in all the save files.
So I ended up only using 2.82 which works perfectly fine and is very stable. It is a real bummer though, not to be able to use new features.
Thanks for your reply - I’m still trying to work out why it ‘back-corrupts’ files and came to the conclusion that it as soon as it crashed it would not open any versions of the file that were saved during that session - ie the whole time Blender had been open. This is still a presumption on my part and something I want to investigate further. So, what I’m doing is quitting Blender every 30 mins or so so that the Memory never gets too full (again, I’m guessing here). So, the next time this crash happens I can see if I can open a file that was saved prior to the last time I quit Blender - hope that makes sense!!
Anyways, I’ll post on here if I get any sort of result from this experiment.
Out of interest, ho do you get an earlier version of Blender and can you open 2.90 files in it?
I still have lot’s of older versions of Blender. I’m usually too lazy to delete them. And then, once in a while, it turns out I actually need 'em.
I think you can download any Blender version here: https://download.blender.org/release/
Otherwise I could send it to you.
I think it should be possible to open 2.90 files with 2.82. For me it was working fine. But I don’t know if it works in all cases.
I just had the crash again. This time I had converted a mesh that had a sub division modifier and a simple deform modifier into a mesh. This produced a really complex mesh so I hit undo and down it went…
However, this time I only had to go back two versions from Dropbox version history to recover the file and I believe it was from the file I saved before last quitting Blender. So, this adds weight to the idea that if you quit Blender and open the same file again, any crash will only affect versions of the fie saved during the most recent Blender session.
Just an update since September: Luckily, my files aren’t getting corrupted after crashes—I think that only happened once or twice—but Blender is still crashing constantly. I’m on 2.91.0 now, but same issue as always. It mostly happens when I’m using another app and then switch back to Blender. Sometimes it’s instant, sometimes it lets me do a few things before it crashes. It doesn’t seem to be undo-related anymore, since switching to legacy undo.
