Blender crashing on me

Blender Courses Talk
#1

hey guys, been trying to finish this fluffy bunny lecture forever now and when i end up doing stuff like the grass particles and render it(preview render not full render) at 5 samples it crashes

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even if i dont use my second screen(the colorful one on the right) it still does crash, my gpu is up to date for the driver, so i just need a better graphics card(Gefore GTX 650 synergy edition) or not but its driving me up the wall :laughing:

even using the CPU, which aint any better(intel i5 650 @ 3.2 ghz) it just freezes when trying to preview the grass(lecture 160 or 161 with weight painting for the ground)

#2

I haven’t gotten this far yet, so I don’t know. Have you tried making the size of the tiles smaller? maybe if it’s rendering a smaller space in a unit of work might help? If you’re using CPU, a drastic step might be to add more memory. (Less drastic than getting another video card!)

Stupid thought: have you rebooted since it last crashed? Make sure that as much stuff isn’t running as possible. (It looks like you have winamp going) stuff like that.

I don’t know if it’s possible to bake any of the textures down, like maybe the trees or something like that. So then the final render objects might be simpler. But I don’t know how to do that!

#3

hey, no winamp isnt running its just set up at at the bottom all the time, and i try having nothing open when i do my renders, my gpu works fine, just for some reason this lecture is killing my computer, my cpu is worse then my gpu though, and is their a way to bake layers? i got 4 or 5 particles set up as hair(like in the lecture) and its crashing all the time, can i bake each layer or particle to make it faster?

EDIT: so i noticed when i go to render it, at the top of the rendering screen it says updating lighting | importance map, then thats when it crashes

#4

Hi MrMini,

This is also a long shot but maybe you could see if your GFX card has newer drivers and try updating them. My Blender has usually stopped working due to out of memory so running the render on CPU should be your best choice (if it’s related to OOM). Have you tried to reduce the hair particles amounts to minimum, say to hundreds instead of thousands or even more?

Cheers, Jax

#5

newest driver is installed for my GPU, also minimized the hair(grass) to about 100-150 each and still crashes, it also crashes regardless if i use CPU or GPU

SO i can seem to render my bunny and such, but when i have the grass in the scene thats when it kills it, even if i use the border and render a very tiny square it still crashes, is their some settings i can turn off…or even on for this scene?

#6

Hi again,

Without seeing the file itself it’s pretty hard to say. But if you have a particle system in your bunny that do not make it crash and then you have another particle system as grass that causes the crash, then maybe you could try to find the differences in the particle systems and try excluding things out. Maybe it’s sub particles, division, amount… I really don’t know. Could be materials too. Do you have something special regarding the grass?

Cheers, Jax

#7

only real difference for the particle systems is that the grass uses the grass images that is out of the zip file from the lecture, other then that its all pretty much the same

here is the file, hoping it works and maybe someone can use the file to see if everything is fine or not

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6d-p7JzvYDTUjg3SEN5SlhUN1k

#8

I haven’t had a look at the file yet, but have you tried updating Blender? I’m on 2.78 now and that seemed to fix a couple of hiccups I had earlier.I see that there is now a 2.78c that has optimizations for rendering! Might be worth a try.

#9

Hi MrMini,

Your problem seems to be pretty obvious if I look at the source file. Now I am not that far in the course but it seems to me that the grass is being made completely incorrectly. Well, it could be that you have gone overboard with it but I don’t know :slight_smile:

The grass is set up by a bunch of planes (in your case many many many planes) that are all alpha tested (tested for transparency) and since all your particles use that same bunch of planes there’s too much for your computer to handle. I could render 10 samples but my computer was really laggy and unresponsive. So I think this is the ground cause of this. There’s big difference how transparent and opaque (non transparent) pixels are rendered and in what order and basically this is the problem. (Without going into details)

But I have good news for you: If you change your grass to (non alpha tested) meshes, you can accomplish the same results and IMO even better than projecting the images to planes (they will be flat right?). So I deleted your grass objects and particle systems completely and created a grass blade (with 3 blades). Then I added a new particle system on which I used the blade. I can give you the project file if you want to so you can tweak it more if you like.

I created a test render out of your project (I hope you don’t mind?) to show you what you can do. I altered the env map location to get better view so bunny can enjoy the sea view :slight_smile:

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Cheers, Jax

#10

thats awesome, and yah i was just following the lecture to a T so not sure where i went wrong, lecutre says to add images as planes, so i did, and yah, so how do i change my planes so that they are opaque instead of transparent? is it just a simple setting or do i need to delete it all and restart the particle section again? i also noticed my bunny for some reason has a ton of faces…like 60k so again not sure how i ended up with so many, unless i subdivided by accident or something way to many times

#11

Hi,

It won’t work if you change the shaders so that it don’t have transparency. Well it works but your scene becomes very ugly. The pictures about the grass have white background which is as such opaque. If you use those as opaque then grass will be very boxy and ugly because the white parts are “meant” to be transparent.

But do like I did instead: Use mesh as particle system and put the shader in the mesh as opaque (like green). You can also use color ramp to have variation. So model the grass blade like you did now but instead of using planes model the actual grass blade.

I can upload the modified blender file to your drive if you want to? Then you can see how it’s easy to do.

Cheers, Jax

#12

Okay i run a Nvidia GTX 680 2Gb card and my render of the bunny was a lot heavier than yours.
I DO NOT have the 378.78 driver version i have the one prior to that and i can render fine.
I suggest you roll back your drivers for your GPU to the previous version and try re-rendering then.
Not sure why CPU would cause a crash though but get back to me on what happens after making this change.

final fluffy bunny 128 samples 720pish.png921×518 2.3 MB

1,803,353 Verts
2,011,314 Faces
2,268,029 Tris
128 samples 1080p 75%
200 light paths
16 * 16 tiles
CPU rendered (My Gpu does the nvidia cuda memory error too)

@System edited a lot of my post in the forum
#13

thanks guys, and i dont think its my actual GPU itself, think its what Jax was saying about my grass, cause it could be the only thing in my scene then crashes, everything else renders perfectly fine, my bunny can render in a few minutes alone, just the grass is the killer

Jax if you can upload the updated file that would be great to see what you did compared to how i did it

#14

Hi again,

I cannot upload the updated file since I don’t have access to that file / folder. So either add privileges to change the file or create a public folder I can upload the file into.

Cheers, Jax

#15

I finally got back to this to play with it today (took some time out of my own projects to take a proper look)
I have fixed it in some sense.
I changed it to CPU render and then changed the tile size in performance to 16*16 (I suspect this is why your CPU crashed out doing this as you didnt reset it to this)
I had to relink some image files that were not in the blender (Its fine as the Student Instructor i keep the files or i could have got it from assets).
Used grass 1-3.

I think i know whats causing your issues as the render did improve before i started tinkering by turnedf the children of the grass to off or simple rather than impolation you may need to play with the hairs and children to get it to render on your system.
I will upload the blend file although you will need to probably go into the node editor on each grass bunch to change the directory of the images used so it gets rid of the pink missing textures.
Bear in mind i have upgraded my rig and i am running the below now.
480Gb SSD hard drive.
24Gb system Ram
3.3Ghz Hexacore CPU
Nvidia GTX 680 2GB (This sucks lol but not gpu rendering!)

And its going to take probably about 2-4 hours to render.

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And the file link
http://www.filedropper.com/rabbit1edited

As a comparison my bunny renders in about 3 hours

1 Like
@System edited a lot of my post in the forum
#16

thanks again, i kinda gave up on it as i’m gonna be upgrading my GPU within the next day or 2, and yah you got 3x more ram and probably a better cpu, as for the gpu im upgrading to a MSI 1060 card for under $300, once i get it installed i will be going back to redo the grass portion of the rendering, i managed to do the tree and bush and bunny no problems but the grass killed it, will also look at the children and do the simple as you mentioned

#17

You made find it still crashes on the GPU as mine did too even after upgrading as the issue is with nvidia and cuda cores :slight_smile:
Glad i could help somewhat :slight_smile:

#18

yes so I’ve installed my new card and it stilled crashed but it crashed about half way through the render, before it crashed even before the render started, progress!

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