I am running Blender under Mac OS v10.7.5 (Lion) and using a 1.7 GHz i7 Intel processor with 4 GB RAM. When I render an image (or worse an animation), I notice that the processor cannot handle it, particularly when “ray tracing” is selected. The whole program crashes and even the computer shuts down requiring a reboot. When I go into the activity monitor, I notice that the CPU usage often goes above 200% during the rendering. This is a new computer I am using here (2012 model). If I unselect “ray tracing”, sometimes, the image gets rendered successfully or the first couple of frames of the animation. However, even with no ray tracing, no environmental map calculations, sub-surface scatterings, no post-processing and no anti-aliasing, the program still often crashes or does not respond, while rendering an image or animation. i have tried the latest Blender version (v2.69) and a previous build (v2.66a).
When using a more powerful machine running Windows, it still takes 2 minutes to render one frame (a total of 8.5 hours for the animation!!!). This is ridiculous in my opinion. Why should I continue to use this software which is not able to render on a recent model computer, when I can use some other software (not free but cheap) which does not have this problem? I still think the Blender team should charge for this software in return for reliability and stability. Disappointing really.
Are you using a cheap iMac to render with Blender, because those machines are not really designed for serious 3D work, and how is it possible to get 200 percent usage of a CPU, something like that might indicate an issue with the hardware or OS.
Anyway, raytracing anything would likely require you have a multicore CPU with a GHz speed above 2/2.5, sticking with scanline only though can potentially be usable even on cheap PC’s.
You’re right, you shouldn’t. Have fun with that other software that suits your needs so much better.
Before you leave, a few remarks:
A 1.7 GHz dual-core i7 (What’s that anyway, a MacBook Air?!) from 2012 is hardly a “recent model computer” and far from being a render beast - excuse my French. A render time of a few minutes per animation frame is not bad at all. And what did you expect? Rendering animations is time consuming even on high-end machines: We’re talking possibly days here, perhaps weeks.
And why did you post this anyway, if you’re giving us zero chance to troubleshoot your problem? No screenshots, no attached .blend file, no further details about the scene to render. What are we supposed to do? This is a terribly helpful community around here, but you have to give us something to work with. Or did you just come to rant?
In this case it is the difference between Windows and Unix/Linux type OS’s.
Windows totals all cores (even virtual) to 100% of your computing power, so running 1 thread at 100% on a Quad Core with HT (8 Threads) equals 12.5% CPU usage.
In comparison, Linux (and I presume OSX) works with 1 core loaded = 100%, so him getting 200% makes sense given its a dual core CPU.
@OP As said before, a Dual Core 1.7GHz Processor isn’t really that powerful, that totals 3.4GHz. My Laptop itself gets 10GHz total when rendering (2.GHz x 4), and some machines I use to render have 16 Cores at 2.2 GHz, so a total of 35.1GHz. Thats 10x faster than your machine, and can still take several minutes per frame easily.
If its crashing, and your RAM isn’t overloaded, then it is a possibility that your PC is overheating, or there is some software compatibility issues (is everything up to date?). I’ve run Blender on a number of Macs (when I’ve had to) and they’ve never had issues running it.
OSX 10.7.5 is 2 versions old now, have you tried upgrading to the latest?
Nothing about that hardware is “modern”. 4GB of RAM was standard before Windows Vista was released. Don’t expect to be rendering anything special on it.
As for a couple of minutes per frame for an animation, that’s low. Really low. Hours long render times per frame aren’t uncommon even in low-quality animation projects.
I’m using a cheap ultraportable Macbook Air. I prefer to render “on the go” but it seems now that I cannot do this and I need a dedicated super computer sitting at home just for the rendering. The Macbook satisfies all the minimum requirements as given on the home page, and because of this, it should work OK. I shouldn’t have to expand it to the “recommended” specs (though I could if I wanted to). Note: I’m not talking about how long the render is taking on the Macbook, I’m talking about whether it works or not. I think that Blender should have sort of “preview” pane so that you can see what the final render looks like without actually rendering. I know that there is already some sort of real time “preview” but it is very very slow even on more powerful machines. I also think that the Blender Team should be more upfront about the system requirements, and not just state the essential minimum and expect it to all work out.
A 100 MB .blend file! I’m not even sure if this forum can accept such large files. Screenshots - of what? I mean, when the program crashes, it either gets greyed out and the mouse pointer hangs (the computer will have to be rebooted), or a message box gets displayed saying “this program has quit unexpectedly” and the program disappears. There is no problem when doing an OpenGL Render, but of course, all the textures will be missing. However for the benefit of the helpful community, I’m willing to attach the crash report. Here you go.
Yes it’s dual core, but when I say 200%, I mean that the PROCESS CPU usage (the CPU % next to the process name “Blender” in the activity monitor) fluctuates wildly and often at times, exceeds 200%. The TOTAL CPU usage at the bottom of course never exceeds 100%.
Everything is up to date except the OS X operating system itself. I should upgrade to Mountain Lion but didn’t due to hardware compatibility issues not related to Blender. When the rendering is working on my Macbook, it takes about twice as long as on the more powerful Windows machine, and the fan is operating at maximum power throughout the rendering process.
You are talking about desktops, not laptops. 4GB of RAM is pretty good for a laptop. The thing is, I need to use Blender “on the go” not in one place all the time. The animation is rather basic actually with just one 3D character in a simple 3D environment with three imported objects from Blender Swap. Nothing fancy like you see in the movies. I expect the rendering to be a lot quicker than this, and I always use “blender render”, not cycles rendering.
Even on the more powerful machine, when the rendering is finished (8.5 hours later), I find that if I selected the output format to be “quick time” or “mpeg4” or “avi jpeg” or something like that, the resulting movie file is corrupt and cannot be played. I have to select the output as “PNG” instead and use another program to import the PNG sequence and create the movie. This I find to be a bit of a hassle as well but the most important thing is that Blender doesn’t really run properly on my laptop even though it should according to the minimum system requirements, and if the Blender team can get that sorted out, that’ll be fine for me.
I also think that the Blender Team should be more upfront about the system requirements, and not just state the essential minimum and expect it to all work out.
Whatever recommended spec is given, it is very easy to make a more complex scene that will bring that system to a standstill / run out of memory. This is the same for any 3D application. Will blender run on your system, yes most certainly, but you have to work within your hardware limitations. The hardware spec you have is not that great for rendering anything complex in a short period of time. Simple and fast render or complex and slow render, or some compromise
If you have a scene that takes long to render or you hit hardware limits, cut back where you can or break it down into separate components and use the compositor to build it back for the final scene
Render Performance tips: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Performance
Even on the more powerful machine, when the rendering is finished (8.5 hours later), I find that if I selected the output format to be “quick time” or “mpeg4” or “avi jpeg” or something like that, the resulting movie file is corrupt and cannot be played. I have to select the output as “PNG” instead and use another program to import the PNG sequence and create the movie.
However powerful your render machine, NEVER EVER render directly to a movie format. Always render to a lossless image sequence such as .exr/.png. If your machine crashes/power failure you can just restart the render where you left off rather than having a corrupt video file that you have to start all over again from the start. The image sequence you can combine to a final movie format directly in blender and will take a few minutes to combine. I’ve never had any problems getting rendered video formats to play on OSX from blender, use the presets
Show us the scene you are having problems with, someone may be able to supply a simple fix. Use the compress option when you save the blend file, use a file host site that takes the file size (Dropbox, Google Drive etc)
bawe! I thought you were already happy with your unnamed “other software”…?
But you’re still around and still fostering your unreasonable expectations, I see. 3D work is amongst the most demanding hardware wise. And still you insist on expecting a blown up netbook to perform flawlessly on heavy scenes?
Yes, maybe that MacBook fulfills Blender’s minimum requirements. But you refuse to face the consequence of that fact: What level of performance do you expect to come from “minimum requirements” being met?
A 100 MB .blend file? Sounds quite heavy - how many polygons are we talking here?
And do these 100 MB include the textures? Here’s a fun fact about texture maps: An image has to be uncompressed in memory to make use of its actual (pixel) content. While a JPEG on disk may be 100kB in size, at only 2048 x 2048 pixels it would already consume 12 MB when uncompressed in memory. Since dealing with images in most programs means “unfragmented memory blocks”, it’s not sufficient to just have 12MB free, it needs to be “in one piece”. Now, how far do you think will your meagre 4 GB RAM take you? And as soon as RAM is depleted, that can mean heavy swapping from and to disk with again desastrous effects on performance.
This is not about having to use super computers for your work, but about having reasonable expectations about what your (very limited) hardware can provide.
Bawe, the minimum spec is the minimum hardware expected to run Blender to any extent regardless of performance. Also, keep in mind the Macbook Air was not designed with 3d rendering in mind, and so performance will be greatly limited no matter what software is used.
If you insist on using that Macbook Air for Blender, my advice to you would be to optimize your scene. For example, lower the subsurf, use fewer samples, fake your caustics, just stuff of that nature.
If you want to go for highly complex scenes, I would actually recommend getting a gaming laptop (you said you needed mobility). You trade off the weight, but with current quad core laptop processors and Nvidia GPUs, you should render many, many times faster than the Macbook air. In fact, I believe MSI has a laptop with an i7 and a GTX 780M, topped off with a Retina display (mac terminology ftw). Hard to get much better than that in a laptop.
Or my final idea, you can lower the scene resolution on the laptop for your test renders, but when you wish to perform your final high res render, upload your project to a server farm like Renderstreet, and your scene will be rendered on their servers for a small fee.
Minimum hardware requirements = minimum performance result. Why is that hard for you to understand?
If you want fast renders, get a machine suited for the job. Just because something meets the miminum requirements doesn’t mean you should expect the best performance from it. How many studios do you think use Macbook Airs for rendering?
And this fantasy you have about an instant render preview that shows you what the render will look like without rendering…how do you expect that to work exactly? If you could see what your render will look like without rendering, what would be the point of rendering? You go find a program that does full raytracing in an instant preview without rendering and come back and tell us all about it. We’ll be waiting.