Ok, so as I use it in blender 2.8, when I instance an object on particles, I use the convert button in the modifiers panel to convert the instanced meshes back into an object so I can forget about the particle system. I am having a bit of trouble though. I have a particle system instancing a plane 300,000 times. In the grand scheme of things that is not all that high given the size of the surface it is covering. As a particles system, I can move around the scene with relatively little lag, toggle in and out of edit mode fine, but when I go to convert the instanced particles blender is just going straight to not responding and doesn’t seem to recover. It doesn’t even lay a finger on my CPU, GPUs or ram, so I know it’s not that my computer isn’t powerful enough… it will just sit there not responding for 30+ minutes before windows finaly spams me if I want to wait over and over again.
I am using blender 2.83. Is this maybe an issue with the version? is there another versioin that may handle this better?
EDIT: I was able to bring it down to 150,000 and it worked out OK. Probably not as dense as I would like it but now I am having another issue, it is putting each of the instanced objects separately. I try to join them together and blender is just not having it. It will not even join 2 objects. I would like to add, even though I set it to 150,000 blender is only reading 30,000 faces in the scene which means, it did not instance 150,000 times. Given that it was instancing planes, it only instanced maybe 25,000 times.
Update, canned that idea, figured out how i can kinda hack it with just the particle system, but from just the standpoint of trying to know if it can be done, is merging 30,000 objects doable? Like, I know it’s a lot to ask of any modeling application, but I feel we are sorta on the cusp of this being doable on a home workstation. I feel there is probably a circumstance where this can happen and if anyone has any ideas I would love to know what the circumstances are.
Hi.
When Blender hangs for a while, if it is not due to a bug, it is usually because RAM has been exceeded and system starts using virtual memory on slow disk. Or because Blender is doing heavy work with Single Thread CPU task. So when you think that your CPU is not working much, you should check with a CPU usage monitor that shows the work of all the threads in a differential way.
Regarding the other thing that you comment, you explain in a summarized way what is the problem that you are currently having.
In the meantime I recommend you read about how Data-Blocks and Users work in Blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/data_blocks.html
I will take a look at that. Yeah, slightly longer summary since I am no longer working in that version of the project, All 8 logical cores were peaking at around 32% usage. for the most part they were all around the same usage, give or take a few percent. No single one was really sticking out like a sore thumb. My ram was hitting 29% out of 32gb. I figured one of those would be the issue but it doesn’t seem to be. I thought maybe it was my disk as virtual memory but I am using a solid state drive and it’s usage was reading only around 3% (rounding up cuz it was bouncing between 1% and 2.5%)… I really feel like this may be a blender thing but I can’t tell if its something compatibility related, maybe it’s just the version I am using. I tried 2.9a and it was worse but I only tried 2.83 and 2.9 so I don’t know if maybe that is a problem in just those versions.
What is ultimately strange to me is at 300k particles it has no problem adding more or taking some away in virtually real time. Maybe takes 1 second to update in the viewport. The instancing works perfect. Even once I got all of them to apply when I dumbed down the particle count a bit it was going a little slower but not much. I notice blender slows a lot with lots of objects in a scene. 30,000 objects with a single face goes way slower than a single mesh with 30,000 faces which I suppose is logical because it is holding a lot of information per object which a single object doesn’t so really its probably far more taxing on the computer but really its shocking how drastic the difference is. Anyway I will read that linked data article.
EDIT: So unlinking them you think may improve performance? I honestly figured that because they were linked it would actually take a load off of the general processing consumption, not the other way around, or I guess in my case, at least make it easier on blender.
No, I just mentioned this because I didn’t quite understand what exactly was the problem you were having when trying to join converted particles, and that can generate some problems in that regard.
ah, yeah, basically, I have a hair particles system (set to 300,000 particles but blender is only making around 30,000 for some reason after applying the density map). I have a plane it is instancing. I (at the time at least) needed the planes to become one object. Converting it creates 30,000 separate objects. My thinking was, convert the system to objects and the ctrl J to join them but once I select more than maybe 20 objects and press ctrl J blender hangs. 30,000 objects, even at 20 at a time will take forever to merge together. Just looking to see if there is a more efficient way to get the entire set of instanced objects to become 1, I suppose, because blender just doesn’t like it.