My friend has been working on a full length film all by himself for the last 2 years that has to premier April 2nd because there are no other times. We are insanely low on time and I’m helping him render, but it keeps crashing for me every 40 frames or so. At first I thought it was mt VRAM, because I only have 8 gigs, and it is using all of it, but I tried rendering with CPU only and it still crashes, which rules that out. I have 64 gigs of ddr5 RAM, and I set my memory allocation to use 3/4 of it, so I doubt that is a problem. The problem persists with both CUDA and OPTIX. Is there something I’m missing?
This kid put an unbelievable amount of time effort and passion into this and I really don’t want to let him down because of my dumb computer issues.
Specs and stuff:
CPU: i9-14900
GPU: RTX 3060 TI
RAM: Corsair ddr5 64GB (idk what it is exactly rn. If u need to know, lmk)
Storage: two 2gb really fast Samsung SSDs. Idk exactly what they are either but lmk if you want this and I will find out)
I’m rendering in cycles at less than 1080p (getting this finished is the top priority, even if it doesn’t look great)
Lmk if theirs any other info you need to know. Any input would be very very appreciated. Thanks!
Try running memtest (https://memtest.org/), preferably overnight. If it finds errors, lower the speed of your RAM. Sometimes, just lower the RAM speed (to, say, 2866 or lower) is enough to avoid the errors.
I had a similar problem, and it was, indeed, a faulty RAM stick. Since I replaced all my RAM (I upgraded from 3000 to 3200) I haven’t had any random crashes.
Have you considered a render farm? For an insanely tight deadline, this would be much faster and more efficient than trying to fix what’s going wrong on your machine
How does it happen? If the PC restarts, this could be because of hardware overheating. Just opening the PC case and leaving it open during rendering will usually have a huge (and free) impact on the effectiveness of cooling. Else than that if you use all of VRAM, it is likely you are actually running out of it at some point. You could try command line rendering to reduce memory usage, also enabling tiles will reduce memory usage if the resolution of your render is high especially if you are also rendering many passses. It might also be helpful to look through the textures that are used and consider lowering their resolution if possible which most of the time is, because assets are usually made without consideration of how big they are going to be on the final rendered image.
It’s a technique that allows you to start a render from outside Blender, without starting the software the usual way. It’s more stable and much less likely to crash.
