I was trying to render an image in cycles using my graphics card. But Blender keeps crashing. I read that version 2.72 can use the graphic card to render. Does anyone know why Blender 2.72 crashes when I attempt to use my graphic card (GeForce GTS 450) to render? It doesn’t crash if I use CPU, but it takes way too long to render. I can’t post my Blend file to PasteAll.org because it’s too big (47 MB)
9 out of 10 times when Blender crashes while rendering this is caused by running out of RAM. The GTS 450 only has 1 GB VRAM, right? That’s very little by today’s standards.
You should see something like this at the top of the Image Editor while rendering:
The area I have highlighted shows the current and peak memory consumption while rendering. What does it show right before the crash? I bet it’s closing in on 1 GB and then “finito”.
@Blanco111, I see on your screenshot that you use smoke/fire. It can’t be render with GPU. If you do not include the smoke domain in your render by putting it in an other layer, does it crash ?
Thanks for responding. I’m technically challenged, and I never even noticed the peak memory consumption while rendering
I got 107 M before Blender crashed in GPU mode. I’m currently rendering out pngs of my scene in CPU mode, and after 37 frames, Blender hasn’t crashed. In CPU mode, the peak memory consumption is about 128 M. It’s not taking as long as I thought it would in CPU mode (5 minutes per frame, 720 1280, 100 samples.) The tutorial did mention Smoke and Fire as well as Volumetrics didn’t work in GPU mode, but I thought I read with 2.72 version of Blender they would. I guess not.
Thanks for responding. I thought I read version 2.72 would support smoke and fire. I guess it doesn’t. I am currently rendering out my scene in CPU mode, and I don’t want to stop it now to check out not rendering the smoke domain. Plus, without the smoke and fire, the scene isn’t worth rendering at all. I still don’t know why I baked the particles and physics as instructed to do so in the tutorial. But that’s a question for another thread elsewhere in the forum.
Edited: It stopped rendering at frame 38 when the building is supposed to explode. The Smoke and Fire come in a few frames later.
Disappointing. I suppose I need to buy a more powerful computer. Any suggestions?
Edited:
I thought it was going to render out in CPU mode. But it stopped rendering at frame 38 when the building explodes. The peak memory consumption is 98.55 M when it stopped rendering.
I was able to render out a single frame of the scene with the explosion and smoke and fire with 500 samples. But I guess that’s different than rendering out with the animation button.
Is my only option to buy a better computer?
Volumetrics are supported in 2.72 but not smoke and fire instead if it uses volumetric shaders (I don’t know why). Rendering animation or a single frame is the same thing excepted if you have motion blur activated.
What format do you render to? Directly to a movie file format (like .mov, .avi or .mp4)? If so: you should never ever do that.
Say, you have a 20,000 frame animation and after 3 weeks of continuous render time something goes wrong with frame number 16,871. If you rendered to a movie file, you now have lost everything. The movie is unusable and the passed render time is lost.
That’s why you should always render the animation to single image files first (like .png etc.). If the render now stops at frame 16,871, the previously rendered frames are safely on your hard disk and you just start the render again from frame 16,872 on. When the rendering is finished, you use Blender’s sequencer to turn that image sequence into a movie file.
Yes, I always render pngs first. But why can’t I render the first frame of the explosion (the smoke and Fire begins a few frames later)? Yet I can render frames well after both the explosion and smoke and Fire started?
