Hello, I am reasonably new to this forum so please bare with me.
System Config;
Rampage 5 extreme MB
i7 5960x on custom water cooled loop
64GB ripjaws 2400mhz ddr4
1tb samsung pro ssd
and it’s bottlenecked with a EVGA GTX 750ti lol soon to be upgraded with 3 GTX980ti’s
So anyway, I have been working really hard on a scene, it is a complex scene that has been spread over 6 layers, I know my pc has more than enough memory and speed to handle the scene. I had actually rendered the scene absolutely fine in 4 k with no errors. But I went back into the project to make a couple of additions (replacing 4 image textures on image as planes) basically to add sparks to my scene.
Now every-time I go to render the scene, it will crash in the same place on any layer when at 90% completion, I have opened up other complex blend files to render just to see if the problem is consitent with other .blend files, but it doesn’t appear to crash on any other file, just the current project I am working on. It is frustrating because it is by far the best piece of work I have done so far.
Blender version ?
What renderer ?
Render settings
What did you change ? What happens when you change it back ?
What if you simplify the scene, what tips it over the edge
I am using Blender ver; 2.76b I also tried to revert to previous version with no luck.
I am using Cycles render.
I had sparks within the scene on emission/transparent planes, 8 in total. All I done was change the the image textures on these planes, the new image textures were considerably larger so I reduced the size of the textures using gimp but it did not make a difference.
I have halved the poly count within the scene and it never made a difference, my pc had no problems rendering the scene when the poly count was double previous to this issue.
One other thing, I added a cube on a separate layer to add volumetric mist to my scene using the volume absorption shader.
I am running the latest build, 2.76b, I tried to revert back to see if it made a difference in which it didn’t.
I am using Cycles Render Engine.
Screen-Shot of render settings.
I have almost halved the poly count to what it was before when it rendered successfully.
The changes I made were pretty straight forward, I replaced the textures on 4 images as planes which are small jpg’s with transparency, they are the planes located at the base of the wheels. I also added an extra layer with a cube with volume scattering for fog.
I did join all the meshes together at one point by mistake, it still rendered ok at the time, but I have now re separated all the meshes, deleted additional ones to replace them with array’s and mirror modifiers to reduce size. I have noticed that all the materials were applied to everything and so I have also removed all the access materials which was the result of foolishly joining meshes in the first place. I know I have a high poly count, but it was double that before and still managed to render with no problems.
I also updated to the new build of blender the day before, I have checked my c++ and graphics drivers are up to date and working well. I have noticed a bios update, I am wondering if flashing my bios with the latest build would make a difference.
Random guess. You are caching your bvh. If you are rendering multiple frames those bVHS are written to disk for each frame and they can huge, like 1 gb per frame huge. It’s easy to run out out of disk space in which case blender, and everything else barfs. Check your disk space, is it really low? If so you need to find that folder with all the bVHS and delete it, disable cache bvh and re rerender the frames.
thought two. Hide any volumetric materials and try. Lower your volumetric max steps from 1028 to 64. Increase step size to speed up for large volumetric scenes.
thought three, lower your transparency bounces from 128 to 16.
yes I have tried the BVH thing previous, I have a large amount of allocated space for bvh/cache files, this was a screen shot of the original, I have halved the poly count on the new save by using modifiers and mirrors on the new save.
I had to turn transparency up to stop the glitching in the volumetric displaced cube smoke (not smoke sim)
I have fixed the issue, kind of, I had another volumetric cube in the scene for fog, I removed it and it now works fine but it is a big sacrifice because it gives the scene so much more depth and so I am interested in exploring your suggestions further to see if I can get the fog working in this scene.
I have seen weirdness and random and unexplainable render crashing with volumetrics. Here’s some time honored blender hacks when unexplainable crashes happen.
Start a new file, file append, go to that train.blend and append the whole scene into the new file and try a render.
Not working, lower your render resoltuion way down to like 3%, and your sample to 5, does it complete?
Reboot your machine and open blender first and try a render
It’s totally posssible the scene append will work, if not respond with how the other tests worked. And of course posting a blend will speed up troubleshooting.
