Hi.
I gained some experience in using Blender during the past weeks and love the software so far. But it seems like my computer is not fast/big enough for doings serious work with Blender… while I thought it is a pretty decent machine.
How did I come to this? Ok, I purchased the training DVDs available at blender.org and got the character models (for example Big Buck Bunny) which ship on the DVDs.Whenever I load a .blend-file from the DVDs and try to render it, Blender freezes or crashes after a while. Ok, the rather not so complex character meshes load and render, but for example Big Buck Bunny (or any other more complex mesh) load but fail to render. I am able to load Big Buck Bunny into Blender and manipulate it in Blender very well. Just at rendering time it doesn’t work.
I thought, as I mentioned allready, that my computer is ready for such stuff. Here’s the facts:
Intel DualCore E6850 @3.0 Ghz
4 GB RAM (because of XP 32 only 3,25 GB are recognized)
NVIDIA Geforce 8600 GTS
Windows XP 32 Service Pack 2
In my opinion this should be a computer which should be able to do serious things… but unfortunately Blender needs a SGI Workstation to run on
I have similar machine/OS. Just way underpowered compared with your and I’ve started and ended quite several serious projects with it all… Is not blender or the OS… (min is equal, but single core, 2gb ram, 2.4ghz, nvidia 7x series,…that aint either an SGI ), and made company mascots game characters, etc, with this “rig” ) I don’t know how you have your system configured/maintained, neither which version of blender are you using, etc. The freeze stuff can be… It’s rendering, just it takes it time and you don’t let it end, or…ram /swap problem in your system…driver problem, some highly instability there. There are a bunch of win users here working with it regularly , no probs. I do at company, produced renders on many thousand pixels for base for designs and other stuff there, in an almost equal machine to mine here… I’d try and see what happens with more simple scene renderings. And what you exactly do previous to the hang… But nope, system is not a prob, ande certainly, neither your hardware, tho I’m personally gonna upgrade: The better it is the faster you work, of course. (tho 90% is how you optimize your workflow and scene, for not adding extra resources/time waste for just checks, etc)
have you tried optimized builds? Just download some and check for rendertimes. There are great differnces in these.
check at www.graphicall.org I recommend the zebulon build with msvc. But just try a few …
Hmm, I don’t really know what you mean with “how you have your system configured/maintained”. Can you please be more specific? What aspects of the configuration/maintenance do you mean?
I use the latest version of Blender.
Nope. It just freezes and very often Blender crashes completely.
As I wrote in my posting, I have 4 GB RAM installed in Dual Channel Mode. Memtest86 V 2.11 showed no errors. I have a 4080 MB swapfile on a fast harddisk.
Did you try adjusting the settings in the particle system? Rendering a lot of fur can use a lot of memory. BBB wasn’t rendered in a single pass on a desktop…
Also check that those files are compatible with Blender 2.49. I have read posts from people saying they have had trouble rendering those files on Blender versions later than the one they were made with.
Be aware that the Big Buck Bunny files are very, very heavy. You’ll really need a 64bit OS and Blender build and a full 4Gb+ of memory if you want to work with all of these files.
As you say lesser files work OK, there’s nothing wrong with your machine apart from running a 32bit OS, you’re almost certainly running out of memory (all that fur/polys/rigs/linked objects/particle systems/grass/nodes etc)
