Simulation and Crashes

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Ok, I’m not a coder or developer, but I had an idea, and was wondering if it would be feasible.

My idea is to run simulations and baking in a separate process. (Fluid, smoke, softbody, cloth…) The potential benefit would be twofold:

  1. Blender.exe would remain responsive to the OS at all times, even when initializing a sim.
  2. If the sim crashed, blender.exe would still be running, and thus you couldn’t possibly lose any work.
    http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/9479/blendercrash.gif
    So, would this work, or is it just amateur nonsense? :eyebrowlift2:
2

Well ! Work done is not lost.

You can open quit.blend in tmp folder.
And you can press current cache to bake in order to freeze calculated sim frames.
Give a name cache to cache.
Save .blend.
Put cache as an external cache.
Then, you can play animation until crash frame.

If you play animation before pressing Current Cache To Bake Button , you loose what was calculated.

Devs made a new UI responsive during render, fluid baking and simulations.
With quick cache, you can preview animation of simulations and change dynamically settings with quick cache before a bake.

Take a look, here.

3

I know, but if blender hangs while starting a simulation (which it seems to do regularly) it will just sit there, not responding, and not doing anything, until you close it. Then you can open the latest .blend from /tmp or c: mp, but it may be several minutes old, which can be annoying. Also, the numbering scheme is seemingly random, and blender sorts files by name, not time modified.

4

I have not so much problems with playing animations.
You probably do complicated or heavy simulations.

A good habit is to save file before baking.
No more problem.