Understanding Blender Crashes

[yaktiswan]

Hi, I have been learning Blender and I am loving it.

But especially sculpting results in a lot of crashes. I can deal with the crashes if thats just how it is, but I just wanted to hear if the amount of crashes I get is to be expected, and if I can do anything to alleviate then.

As an example I have attached a pic from a project from a tutorial. If i try to remesh it further, or subdivide then I am almost gurenteed a crash.Even editing the shape and saving, without further remeshing, is a bit unstable.

My pc hardware is:

32gb ram

Intel Core i9 139000KF (Raptor Lake-s)

GeForce RTX 4070 Ti

Any tips and experiences would be greatly appreciated.

[Worker11811]

Mac OS has a Crash Reporter that you can use to tell what happened when the crash occurred. It pops up whenever an app goes down.

I don't do Windoze so I don't know what kind of crash reporting you've got.

Anyhow, most of the Blender crashes that I see are due to some sort of "out of memory" condition. I have my computer's memory maxed out at 32 gig so I don't see many crashes.

Out of memory crashes often happen in Blender when there are too many polygons or particles, etc. to process. If you have modifiers like "subsurface" active, the number of faces/polygons/particles are multiplied. That can EASILY blow you out of memory.

Another thing that can cause out of memory crashes are complicated materials with complex, interconnected nodes or with large, memory intensive image textures.

You can disable most modifiers in display mode and that will save memory and CPU-ticks while you are working. You can also rearrange the modifiers for most objects in the modifier stack. Let's say that you have an object which has a "Subsurface" modifier and, then, has an "Array" modifier. Blender will subdivide the object then duplicate all of those vertices/faces for each iteration of the Array modifier.

Let's say you have a mesh object with 100 vertices or faces. A subsurf modifier set at "2" will multiply those vertices by 4, giving you 400 verts. Now, the array modifier has to work on 400 verts X the number of duplicates in the array. If you reverse the order of those two modifiers you can save the computer a lot of work (and memory) because it will duplicate only 100 verts, then it will go back and smooth them out with the subsurf array.

Put your modifiers in order to reduce the amount of work/memory that the computer needs to do.

Shut off work/memory intensive modifiers the Display mode so that they only work at Render time.

Keep the number of vertices and particles down to the minimum needed to do the job to save work/memory.

Simplify materials and textures to save the computer work.

Without seeing the Blend file you are working on, it's hard to tell you much more. There are some settings that aren't particularly intuitive unless you can look at them.