Just wondering if someone could tell me if the problem I am having is program based or computer performance based.
I have modelled a scene that is really large and detailed and when I go to render, the program shuts down with an error report. I have ordered a new computer which is supposed to be incredibly powerful and was wondering if this issue will be resolved with the new computer or is it a program error and I’ll have to reduce the amount of vertices in my scene anyway?
The file is around 200MB and when I render the memory usage at the top of the window gets up to around 1.85GB before it crashes, (I have 2GB RAM)
I really really don’t want to have to reduce my scene as the shots I need will be a mixture of close up zoom bys (hence the detail required) and panned out shots.
A 200 MB File? Big Render? I would not be surprised if it’s simply a memory issue, as you say it goes up to 1.85 GB - it can’t get farther and therefore crashes. Have you tried rendering not in a single image but to render several images? You can always divide the image into several smaller ones, with Border rendering or the X/Y Parts.
This may help you, but if the scene is too lagre (if it needs more than 3GB) you should think about buying some real workstation and a modern 64-bit OS. Also, on that wiki page you can find useful tips. Try to use as much instanced meshes as possible, try rendering different layers of objects and if the output resolution is huge, save image buffers to hdd.
You are all right that it seems to be a memory issue. I can divide up the render and it works. Yes I am running a Dell with a Pentium D dual core processor (maybe not the best), but I do have 2GB of RAM and my virtual memory is set at 4,092 MB. I am also using Windows XP.
Anything in there look out of whack???
Sorry all, I’ve been away. I think it’s going to be perhaps too much work for me if I have to render different parts and then put them together with the time I have, you’d know what I mean if you saw the scene but it’s a little hard to post at 200MB to show. This is to be an animation not just a still by the way, and with lots of camera movement along paths with objects changing their relative order of positions from the camera during the same take etc.
I’m not sure what border rendering is but I’m going to look it up, perhaps it’s the solution. To date, if I’ve had to break things up to help with render time all I’ve done is given the objects that pass in front of the objects I’m rendering a completely black non reflective material so that I can overlay them with the video sequence editor later. This particular job would be a nightmare to do that way though. Besides, I was hoping to get time to play around with the new DOF feature and this could be just complicating it.
The new workstation is an HP XW 8400 dual quad core (8 core) w/ 2.66GHz per core and 4GB RAM running XP Pro. Nice powerful card too - QuadroFX 4600 (all overdue for delivery). I was thinking about going with the 64bit but was told by the supplier that it would be completely unnecessary and an overkill of great proportion - perhaps not though huh? Surely this will solve it if it’s a memory issue?
Hey can anyone tell me if Blender uses the multiple cores during normal use of the program ie. modelling and generally moving things about or does the multithreading only come into play during rendering?
You need to remember that you still have a gpu taking up some of your memory (if you have shared memory-motherboard gpu) and your operating system is using memory also.
Blender only uses threading during render. I sure wish post production in the nodes used multithreading but it doesn’t. All you have to do is pull up a system monitor window (task manager on windoze) and you can see how much cpu power is being used at all times.
I don’t know about windozeXP 64 bit but Blender 64 bit on Linux is a lot faster right out of the box than standard Blender. About 25 % faster. I think if you do much Blending you should install a 64 bit version of Linux on one of your hard drives just for Blending. 64 bit Linux has a lot of problems but Blender is a shining star on it. It works very well, verry fast, and doesn’t crash everytime you sneeze like it does on windoze. If you don’t use the nodes compositor on windoze then you probably don’t have many problems with Blender crashing on windoze.
That crashing might be caused by Blender memory management. I don’t know how exactly it is using RAM, but it seem there are some errors from time to time. I’ve experienced also crash after render finish, but when I rendered the same scene again it was ok.
That 200MB contains also textures? If yes, then it isn’t that large.
XP Pro 32bit will not even ‘see’ 4GB of RAM. Period. Depending on the system setup, you wil see 3.2-3.7GB of physical RAM. With that system of yours, 64bit Linux is the way to go.