A number of issues with animating the bowling ball

[StuWeb69]

Hey all! I’m not expecting all of these issues to be explained or fixed here, I’m more just reporting what I encountered. But if anyone has any advice it would be very welcome!

1. When I finished my animation, everything worked well in the main Blender objects window as intended, but when I rendered it, the exported video showed all the pins move to the cursor location (so it looked like there was only one pin and it was clipping through the alley), and the ball never showed up. It took a long time to render and was clearly rendering frame by frame, but all renders appeared this way even though the objects window played it correctly. In the end, restarting my computer fixed the issue, so I’m just going to put this one down to a simple glitch.

2. Yesterday I was able to render out a good video of the ball smashing through the pins. Then I decided to go an extra step and created a nice camera movement to go along with the animation. On hitting render with the new camera movement, Blender crashed (as it has done many times). Now Blender refuses to open the Bowling Alley project, immediately crashing when I try to open it. It also crashes when I try to open the .blend1 file, so now I have no access to this project anymore. Going to learn from this one that many, many backups are needed when working with Blender.

3. This one I can’t really explain and I’m wondering if I’m going crazy. That one good video I was able to export yesterday (a .mkv file) worked fine even after the final Blender crash (so I don’t think I accidentally overwrote it while trying to render out the second version of the animation) and I was going to upload it today. However, today the file is only 800 bytes and can’t be played. No idea what happened there.

Overall, I’m surprised by how unstable Blender seems to be. I work mainly as an animator in After Effects, and After Effects can certainly act up at times, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

I’m working in version 2.83.5 of Blender (I think I saw Marc suggest it was the latest version with LT support) on a new 2019 MacBook Pro with the following stats if anyone is able to make sense of what might be causing these issues:

[Jaco_Pretorius]

Sorry to hear about your issues. I’m assuming you’re rendering in cycles with GPU acceleration turned on?

Usual suspect for cycles instability is graphics drives… Try follow the links in the Blender Graphics Hardware docs to see if it helps. (Your best bet is running Blender from the command-line and googling any error messages)

In the past 800 hours of Blender use I’ve only managed to crash it a couple of times… mainly from doing silly things like boosting the levels on the multirez or subdiv modifiers on a already high-poly model, and once in the NLA editor I was doing something weird with a driver expression… I also stick to “stable” releases, but from my experience Blender has not crashed unless I’m doing something dangerous (i.e. something likely to eat up memory or put Blender in a never-ending loop)… would like to hear other’s experience also.

Good luck

[FedPete]

Search on this forum channels for more answers and explanations!
Because it is probably a graphics card driver issue! As Jaco explained (AMD has issues in that)
A week ago, someone with Win10 had similar issues.
He did a rollback of drivers (to a previous version) and his problems went away.

In the past, I had many Blender crashes. Still do, but these are all related to the Vonoroi material node.
But those in the past were mostly my vault. In that sense of very high subdivision, memory consuming things. Or due to inexperience Blender usage, strange, unlogical combinations of Blender function. Everything is connectable, configurable, but not always logical to Blender. So it could crash.

You should try to render without GPU. GPU is not always faster then CPU. Depend on project type.

Let us know how you proceed it this!

[NP5]

As others have said Blender is very stable. Unless doing something very excessive. A simple render causing problem is probably graphics related especially if on AMD, Mac.

Are, were, you rendering out to separate image files or risking getting it all done in one? Though not into animation it seems the proper way is separate series of images joined up later in the compositor.

[StuWeb69]

Thanks for the reply! No, all was being rendered in Eevee. But good to hear it’s not meant to be this unstable, I’ll take a look into those documents you linked, thanks!

[StuWeb69]

Thanks for the tips! I’ll try to make sure I’m working from the CPU. These issues were happening while rendering through Eevee, I can’t see a setting for CPU vs GPU at first glance in Eevee but will get googling!

[StuWeb69]

Normally I would favor separate images but in this case went with a risky video file as that’s what the instructor suggested.

But thanks for the advice about AMD/Mac. I have a Surface Book 2 I may blow the dust off of and see how it performs.

[FedPete]

Eevee is CPU only I believe.

[Jaco_Pretorius]

Eevee uses OpenGL (so it will use your GPU if it can). Driver issues may still be a culprit.

[Marc_Carlyon]

⚓ T83521 Materials do not appear in Viewport Shading

This is an issue on all RX cards at the moment and is still presenting in both the complete blender creator and the characters course for those AMD cards

[Digitz]

Funny, I started with blender 2.8, literally just after it released. I run an RX 470 and have never had the materials not showing up issue with Eevee, Cycles, LuxCore or Radeon ProRender engines whether I choose CPU or GPU or both if the engine allows.

Every now and then I do get an arbitrary Blender crash, but each time that happens it’s usually me playing with LuxCore or ProRender playing with shading so I doubt that is specifically related to the GPU type.