Course BCC - Problems to get a good resolution to retopology + Blender Crashes

Hey guys! So, to finish the Orc I’m struggling a lot… The course is really great but I guess I started to add to much complexity to my character. I know Grant (amazing instructor and methodology btw!) said to keep the character not so much different of the main reference, but I thought I would be do fine… Well, sorry by that :frowning:

So now my Character has about 3 millions Tris and in some point it reached 7 millions. I was trying to create more details for the mouth so I didn’t see other way than increasing the resolution…

The problem is that even not satisfied with my character I decided to move on and start the retopology because I spent too much time redoing a lot of times the character in the session 7 (Detailed Sculpting). Anyway with the Auto Retopology i reached 55.000 Tris (too much yet but if I decrease the resolution I lost all details), before to do that I decided to remove completely the ear to redo because the auto-retopology is a mess in that area (I would need in fact increse the resolution I guess). In anyt case, to remove the ears decided to use the Box Trim tool, but my the computer just got frozen for more than 20 minutes to cut something… That’s normal? I mean, my computer is a i7-9700KF with 32GB of RAM and a G-Force 1050ti 4GB. That’s not enough to do a simple cut?
And seems the Blender is not using the GPU?

Also the thing is VERY frustrating is that, I just don’t know why, when I select some object the Blender just crashes without warnings! Then I need to reopen and I never can select that object again! I needed to redo the model SEVERAL times! Then to avoid so much rework I try to save different versions every time I do some significant change. Why to save in a different file? Well, because saving in the same file seems not enough… As said when I open the .blend I just can’t select that object in the Outliner or View Port, so basically the file seems corrupted, useless, so I need to back to a previous version and start over and over again redoing things I already had.

That’s a normal workflow?
What I’m doing so wrong to have so much problems to handle a simple character with my computer specs?

Sorry the long text and if is not clear, I’m just trying to back to a nice flow here, thanks :slight_smile:

I am no expert on computers, but logically and from what you are describing the project is overloading the computer.
It’s not the simple cut so much as the straw on the camel’s back I suspect.

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Yeah, logically I agree with you, but still yet seems that is not so much thing to process here. I thought that I would just have some issue using a lot more tris. So I can conclude that to work with 2 million tris I need at least 64GB of RAM? And again, the Blender seems not been using the GPU. I’m not expert too, but I thought that my computer would be more than enough to handle this procedures.

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GPUs are very, very stupid in math (float) calculations. They are a master in simple matrix maths. Add this to millions on numbers, super fast. Blender uses CPU heavily for calculations on vertices and materials nodes (a lot of scientific maths).

I think, because of you working for the first time on sculpting and wanting too much at the first learning steps, Blender gets confused about the flow of working. Blender is a tool, you need to work within the working specs of Blender. Otherwise you get strange, unexpected results.

Most artists will do retopology by hand and or use plugins (addons) with better results than de defaults provided by Blender. I would advise the manual option. Because of the learning process.

My own personal experience with Blender crashes is that I hadn’t enough Blender knowledge. I just tried what I thought was the correct Blender way. I didn’t watch the memory consumption (too many vertices).
Unlogical working methods, add modifiers in strange, Blender unlogical ways.

If your computer freezes, probably disk swapping because of the huge memory load of the high poly Orc.
Converting from High to low and working with high and low (baking) requires a lot of memory.

How many vertices does your high orc have?

I have a simple laptop, no high-end GPU. Hadn’t crashes in many months (only when I go experimenting).

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In a OS (and in Blender prefs too) you can assign memory to the process.
If the memory assigned to the process is used, that the OS starts to swap out memory to disk (called virtual memory). This is in comparison to process cvery very slow. I see in your process monitor 14% file io, so disk swapping is in order.

Increase memory usage to the Blender process.

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