Smoke and high poly mesh : how to avoid crash when rendering?

Hello everyone !

to sum up my problem, blender crashes when i try to render my scene (a plane with an ocean modifier, so pretty heavy, a few very basic meshes a particule system with icospheres and a smoke simulation 256 divisions, 4 high res divisions). I tried both cpu and gpu, the smoke, particules and ocean are baked, and it’s really annoying. The thing is i can render everything but the smoke or everything but the ocean, but the two together just crash blender.

I guess my computer is just too bad, but is there any sort of workaround using layers or such ?

here’s a very quick render of the scene without the smoke so you can get an idea.

Thank you !

That’s a heavy scene you have there.

You can try reducing the tile size of the render… maybe reduce the resolution of the ocean sim by one, (the ocean is faster to bake after all) …reduce the number of particles and scale up the particles to compensate (again, a particle system is faster to bake than smoke)

Are you using fluid particles? if so, remember when reducing that the number of particles is volume whereas the particle size is length, so if you double the particle size you divide the number of particles by 8 … like you can for 8 1x1 boxes in a 2x2 box.

And you can decimate the icosphere you’re using as a particle, or replace it with a lower res icosphere.

I’d say, don’t even bother with the smoke. You can fake it with the Z pass and a series of node textures in the compositor.

Z pass doesn’t work with volumetric objects and nor does an alpha layer, but compositing the smoke IS POSSIBLE with some careful nodery and a dummy lo-res version of the sea in the smoke’s layer.

What volumetric? If you use a Z pass instead of a smoke simulation there wouldn’t be any. Unless you mean the water?

The Z pass will read the outside of the cube that contains the smoke.

We’d take away the smoke simulation. The Z pass can be used to fake smoke.

You could try using Adaptive Subdivision which should reduce the complexity of the the ocean the further away from the camera it gets. Maybe that will give your machine enough room to calculate the whole scene.

The Zpass/mist pass was my first obvious choice, and is how i started, but here i’m talking about visible smoke with volutes and such (I wasn’t sure this would work but I find the baked smoke really cool looking so I’d like to see it rendered)

but if I have no choice I’ll go with that

thanks

good idea, I’ll try that thank you

Use the compositor to build your final scene. Render the ocean. Separately, render the smoke. Use “MultiLayer OpenEXR” for everything.

Smoke can be “fattened up” by overlaying the smoke layer with copies of itself, sometimes with the speeds altered slightly, tinting the layers, random noise textures modifying things, and so forth. And at that point in the process it’s essentially free: the “rendering” is already finished.