No. meshes limit ?

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hello,

After taking a very long break from blending (none since Christmas, shame on me) I finally got back to work on my Death Star Trench (it’s lurking somewhere in the WIP forum if you haven’t seen it).

The trench is just a load of duplicated square tiles. I remodelled one of these tiles, deleted the rest and remade the trench using the new, improved tile. Now, Blender will render one or two sides to the trench in under 2 mins (probably under 1 min), but it looks like it won’t render 3 sides at all. I’ve left it for over 10 minutes with no sign of rendering (yes, yes, I know some renders can last hours, but this is for an animation !).

I am somewhat mystified as to why it can’t handle three sides, when 2 sides are possible quite quickly. Is there a mesh and/or polygon number limit (like the 64k vertex per mesh limit) ? A total number of vertices limit perhaps ?

I had a similar problem with the laser turrets a while back, but I never found out why exactly, or if there was a way around it.

My system :
Packard Bell 1.1GhZ (Celeron)
128 mb Ram (too small but there we go)
Win XP
TNT2 M64 32mb graphics card

2

Mmmm… don’t thing 64kv is the problem.

128Mb can be.

If two side rendering is fully in RAM is OK if with 3rd face you began to use the swap file you have problems.

Check with the task manager or whatever how much memory Blender uses, vrify if yuor HD spins madly, try command line rendering.

If your render crosses the threshold times can easily get 10 times slower or more.

Stefano

3

Thanks…

Rendering eats up virtually all memory. The hard disk light flashes madly with that irritating noise it makes.
Some questions :

  1. What is command line rendering ?
  2. What is this threshold of which you speak ?
  3. If I turn off double-sided, would this help rendering times ?
4

in all honesty i would suggest upgrading your comp. the 1Ghz is fine but i say no less than 512Megs of RAM. grafix card seems ok but wouldnt hurt to upgrade that either.
also your hard drive might be slow. if its 7200RPMs then your ok but if its 5400RPMs you might need to upgrade that too.

5

128mb seems a little low, but i run blender quite fine on 256mb. There might not be an easy solution to this problem, but it’s taking you about a minute to render the trench @ 1.1ghz? I did something similar and it took me 15secs max to render the entire trench.

6

Say your scene is tunnel.blend

from a DOS window (or bash terminal) go to the directory holding your models (cd c:\where\you\keep hem ) and type

blender -b tunnel.blend -f 1

you might need to tell the full path of blender C:\where\you\have\blender
the trailing 1 is the frame to render, if you render frame 100 put 100.

That ineffable number at which the sum of Blender used memory + the operating system core memory + any other running thing is 128

Very hard to foretell.

I would be much surprised if it happens :slight_smile:

Stefano

7

When I was rendering some very high resolution pictures to put on big posters at my bar mitzvah, I had a similar problem. Try using the Xparts and Yparts buttons in the display buttons, a little ways underneath the RENDER button. With these you can divide the picture into smaller pieces and have it render a bit at a time, then afterwards combine all the pieces.

Maybe this’ll help, maybe it won’t. You might as well try.

8

Thanks weirdhat ! It worked !!! :smiley:

I have to say I’m surprised it did though - I thought blender rendered everything in the scene/selected layers, regardless of what the camera was actually looking at ?

As for YOU, banana_sock, rendering a trench in 15 seconds, grrr… (angry mutters)… disgraceful…(turns green with envy) :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll have to get more RAM one day… but not today.

Thanks again !