Hi,
I have a Dell Precision T7400, IntelR Xeon R CPU @ 2 .50 Hz @ 2GB Ram. XP SP 2 and Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 Open GL. Using Blender 2.46. When rendering, Blender will crash. Have tried changing card settings and re-installing Blender but get the same. Can anyone help?
Thanks
Flint401
Does it crash on every scene or just a specific scene?
Are you using yafray or the internal Blender renderer?
What size file are you rendering?
In my experience, Blender crashes when it runs our of memory.
Can you post your .BLEND file?
Hi Atom,
Thanks for responding!!!
It will crash on different scenes.
I am using Internal Blender renderer.
File size is one mesh, one cam, one light, 300 frames, NTSC 100%, black background with Star field. Nothing fancy.
I have a new machine and have had the problem almost from the get go. I have never had a problem with my old machine. I have twice the ram and a faster processor with this machine. Also, I have an Open GL card with the new machine. Blender is the only program I have a problem with so far.
Thanks
flint401
Wich is your OS? Did you change something (upgraded, add software, aso)?
Hi Almux,
My OS is XP Pro SP2. I have very few programs on this machine. Nothing that I don’t have on my other machines.
Flint401
Try rendering a different project to narrow down software or hardware issue.
I have come unstuck by creating scenes more complex than needed
if it is a hardware issue…(and you are rendering 4 threads with the xeon) it could well be heat related and the CPU heat sink is not seated correctly or it is not large enough to disipate the heat generated
Hi ifx,
I tried rendering different projects and get the same. The scenes I am rendering are very small and are not complex at all. My other machines handle them fine.
flint401
Odd.
This is started happening to me. I have a fairly powerful laptop (8GB RAM/Dual Quad core 1.6GHZ i7), but all of my various Blender versions have started crashing on one of my projects. There are a lot of particles in my project - it’s basically some grass with a tree.
The grass renders nicely (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaron-newton/5702974928/in/photostream/lightbox/) but when I add (link) a tree to the scene it crashes. The tree has a decent number of polys, but nothing too crazy (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaron-newton/5706310534/in/photostream/lightbox/). So I guess my problem could have something to do with the linked library in Blender? Happy to post a link to the file if someone else wants to try and render it
What format are you rendering too? 300 frames NTSC sounds like a movie format perhaps your problem lies there.
Can you render the 300 frames to images as a test?
?
I’m just hitting f12 to try and render the current frame. This results in Blender crashing (in both 2.56, 2.57, Win 7 64 bit).
Not sure where I mentioned NTSC (or 300 frames)? I think this was in reference to flint401’s issues.
Follow up.
I tried a new grass scene with a new linked object (a cube) and it rendered okay: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaron-newton/5706792552/in/photostream/lightbox/
I’m looking at a few other things now.
It’s a frame size. Look under the render settings under dimensions. There are several options for NTSC, and 100% is in reference to the resolution.
Blender renders to frames (images) by default.
That’s right he’s the original poster to the thread and you’ve hijacked it with your problem that may or may not be related. So perhaps open a new thread. 
 Originally Posted by <b>yellow</b> [](http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1855133#post1855133) NTSC sounds like a movie format
It’s a frame size. Look under the render settings under dimensions. There are several options for NTSC, and 100% is in reference to the resolution.
Blender renders to frames (images) by default.
Thank you so much I missed that jk. 
I’m aware of that I was kinda paraphrasing, NTSC would suggest movie frame size & encoding rather than rendering.
Perhaps flint401 may get back to us.
@ aaronnewton: Before hitting F12, open the console window for 2.5x. Then, when the crash occurs, note if any messages are displayed in the console. If you see any lines with the words “malloc” or “calloc,” then it is likely Blender is memory-starved. That may seem improbable given that you have 8 gigs of RAM, but after having similar issues (a scene with lots of particle hair, btw), I was told that Windoze will only allocate a limited amount of memory to any one application. The figure told to me was 1.4Gb per app, but I’ve also seen mention of 2Gb. In any case, it may be that all that RAM is simply under-utilized by your OS.
In my case that was pretty much confirmed after I installed an Ubuntu boot option, and ran a crash-prone file under Ubuntu with a 64-bit version of Blender (the Win boot was 32). It rendered successfully.
Another tip: The acceleration option you choose can have an effect on memory usage. often very significant. For me, some files that crashed in Windoze using the “Auto” option in the Performance>Acceleration Structure panel would render OK (though slower) using the “Octree” option with a value of 512.
Thank you chipmasque - that’s the kind of path I was heading down anyway.
There was no errors on startup or in the console (just the usual API warning), but I did some sleuthing. It doesn’t appear to be a memory issue:
Here is some info on the exception code (Fatal Exception Code C0000005) that the crash report was giving me:
So I ran procmon (which, it happens, also shows registry messages in addition to file errors) and found the following:
It seems like this could be the issue. I might try deleting some of my Blender installs and reinstalling Blender using “Run as Administrator” on the installer to make sure it actually adds the registry values.
Thank you for the other tip as well. I’ve been reading up on octrees for XNA, so I could see how that might reduce memory usage. It’s also Microsux, not Windoze.
In my experience, the Windoze error codes were useless for tracking the actual problem, but hopefully your mileage will vary. When I also tried analyzing the issue using the Win tools, I saw no specific memory-related problems, because there was always apparently ample overhead even on my relatively slim (3Gb) Vista 32-bit machine.
But because of the Windoze per-application memory allocation limit, when Blender made calls that exceeded that limit, it would crash – it is not very polite in that regard, even the devs admit that. The messages in the Blender console window confirmed the siutation – they always indicated a call that exceeded 1.5 - 2 Gb total memory allocation (hence the “-alloc” in the message) for Blender.
So after uninstalling my various Blenders, removing my app data directory (i.e. C:\Users\aaron\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation) and reinstalling using the “Run as Administrator” option, I seem to be able to render my file. Additionally, I don’t seem to be getting the errors showing up in procmon like before.
Good that you found a solution! I have a vague recollection of a caution about using the Win installer for earlier versions of Blender due to issues (unspecified) with not installing it as an Administrator, so perhaps your prob is related.
If you feel your solution’s solid, maybe mark this thread [SOLVED] to give it a flag for future searchers with similar difficulties.
If you feel your solution’s solid, maybe mark this thread [SOLVED] to give it a flag for future searchers with similar difficulties.
Sounds good to me. People who read this should get some idea of the debugging options, and I hadn’t realised that the original post was from 2008!
Excuse my ignorance, but how can I mark this as solved? Trawling the FAQs as we speak).
That’s right he’s the original poster to the thread and you’ve hijacked it with your problem that may or may not be related.
My intention was not to hijack the thread. If you look carefully the original thread was from 2008, so if anything I bought it back to life (zombie thread). I hadn’t actually realised this at the time of posting, and the symptoms flint401 was describing were nearly identical to my own.
Either way, I think that some pretty good debugging stuff came out of it - thank you for your input.