I’m using Blender 2.59 on Win 7 Home Premium. I’m performing some large Boolean modifiers (800,000 faces combined) and it’s taking forever. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a matter of hours, days, or never at this point. I’ve heard Blender runs better on Linux. Would it be worthwhile for me to make a liveUSB Ubuntu drive and run Blender on that? Would that shorten the time it takes to do large Booleans?
More RAM, more RAM !
Your installed Windows will beat the pants off any ‘live’ operating system you choose.
A liveUSB OS, for various reasons, preforms MUCH worse.
My advice is to dual boot Windows / Ubuntu. It’s very easy to install Ubuntu after Windows.
I dual boot Windows and Linux. And Blender screams (fast) in Linux. I have no numbers, just my observations that the Linux Blender experience is a much more pleasant one.
I do, however roll my own Linux. Currently using a stripped down and highly customized Ubuntu 12.04 minimal server with Xcfe4.
I advise against using standard Ubuntu ( Unity desktop and all that jazz… ) too many processes going on in the background. The ‘Compiz’ graphics manager takes up close to half a gig or RAM all by its lonesome…And that’s RAM that could be going to your ‘boolean’ operations in Blender.
Take a look at Xubuntu or Lubuntu if you want fast.
get your Blender here: ppa:cheleb/blender-svn (more up to date)
… or here: ppa:irie/blender ( includes Freestyle patch)
And your CUDA here: ppa:aaron-haviland/cuda-4.0
(If don’t want to compile yourself…)
Perhaps you should switch to 2.62 as the the boolean modifier was rewritten to use the Carve library.
Depending on your hardware Linux might be faster. Just use a simple scene and render it on your computer in Windows and Linux. The render time is given in the upper left portion of the render window.
I already maxed out my ram at 16GB.
I’ve tried Ubuntu (LiveUSB) before with mixed luck. I ran all updates, and it never worked again. I suppose I could try Xubuntu, but I’m doubtful I can get it to work if I can’t even get Ubunt working.
I’ll try upgrading Blender first to see if that helps.
I have Windows 7 and latest version of Ubuntu in the same laptop computer.
The startup time of Blender in Windows is 4 sec. vs 0.4 sec in Linux. Rendering and performance is not much different.
Get Blender 2.62
In every version before Blender 2.62, the boolean operations were -extremely- slow at high polycount.
2.62 introduced a completely new boolean code that is much faster.
Pre-2.62 i had a high poly model on which using a boolean was taking more than 10 minutes of waiting for the whole operation to actually process.
Post 2.62 for the same model … 15 seconds.
Will do.
Btw, that last Boolean I started about an hour before starting this thread just finished. So, about 5 hours. :no:
One thing I’ve noticed that is faster in Linux is rotating or moving the 3D View. In Windows 7 x64, there’s always a bit of a delay between clicking-and-moving the mouse button and the actual movement/rotation of the view. In Linux, no delay whatsoever.
I haven’t tried a comparison of rendering yet.
my opinion is not of any help, but i had to install WINXP on my WinVista laptop just to stop the “lags”.
Just installed Blender 2.62. The Bool Op I was doing that took 5 hours in 2.56 took about 30 seconds in 2.62.
I also discovered that I had all my normals flipped in both meshes. I had extruded a displaced plane the wrong way. I’m not sure if that would affect processing time or not.
Thanks for the help.