I have very little experience with Eevee. I guess cycles is a great crutch for me as a beginner to make things look better a bit faster.
But I have a project full of particles and smoke simulations, and it's taking 3 minutes per frame. That is after cutting all sorts of settings I know of to speed up the render, including cutting down samples to 150. If I went normal cycles I was looking at 30 minutes per frame.
If the project turns out the way I envision, that will not cut because I'll need to iterate for several teams. So I thought maybe it's time to learn.
But I cannot for the life of me understand why immediately when I try to render with Eevee I crash. It will render with cycles but not with eevee? So odd. Have you guys ever seem something like that?
Next I thought about resetting all render settings to start troubleshooting from there, but I could not find how to do that. Is there a way to reset render settings?
Hi Nathi,
I don't know how to reset them, but there is an Addon called Copy Render Settings in blender, so you could copy the settings from a new file to your file. But you could also just Append your Scene into a new File.
The bad news is, that it has probably to do with your hardware and not with the render Settings...at least that is what I expect, can't be sure. I have had EEVEE crash on my old computer, while Cycles was doing fine.
What I tend to do is what Martin said, when a scene crashes, I append all my stuff into a new scene or copy paste every single thing one by one and start doing renders. If it never crashes then the bug was left behind, if it doesn't crash until I bring a specific object, than that thing was what was causing the crash so I know to take it out.
Particles and smoke simulations will add time to a render on any PC.
A likely cause is your hardware, Eevee uses only GPU rendering, utilizing the CPU to prepare models for the GPU to render.
What are your PC specs? (GPU (vram), CPU, Mem)
Is your OS and device drivers up to date? (GPU drivers specifically)
also,
How dense is the scene? (Number of objects, tris)
What Blender version are you using?
Thank you for all the ideas guys, I'll have to run some tests. Currently just appending the scene didn't quite do the trick, so I think I'll have to do the one by one suggestion to check when it crashes.
I don't think it's a particularly heavy scene, but here's the screenshot with the info:
I have disabled the particles simulation, so this is just the smoke. and the main model. Nothing too crazy I don't think.
Everything is updated, it is a MacOS Sonoma 14.5. M1 Max Chip, 10 cores, 64GB of RAM, 4TB disk space. The GPU card is the built in M1 Max, 32 cores, Metal 3. I also have tried on my less spec'd Mac, which is the same, but just 32GB and only 1TB of Disk space (not that I think this makes a difference?)
Sometimes Blender just crashes like that. Luckily it is a simple scene and you can try the one by one trick. What I do is open a new blend file, Take the helmet, render in Eevee since that's what giving you troubles, if it's all fine then take another element, render again, and so on until everything is on the new blend file or it crashes as soon as you introduce a new element, that way you know which element is the buggy one and you can leave that element behind and remake it from scratch in the new scene.
It's a simple scene, but with pretty dense objects, 2 million tris for 10 objects is quite a lot.
When starting a project, you really need to decide on what render engine you want to use early on.
There are more differences between Eevee and Cycles than realism and render times.
Think of Eevee as more like a game engine. It requires lower poly modeling and simpler scenes to work efficiently, or to even work at all.
Do you have subdivision surface modifiers on the model(s)?
If you do, You really want to keep the subdivision level at 2, max 3.
Try reducing the subdivision level and try again.
Easy way to do this, In the render properties, enable simplify and expand the settings, set the max subdivision to 0 under render.
Try and render with Eevee, if it works, try again increasing to 1 or 2 and see if you your scene will render.
Another tip: Enter solid view in the 3d viewport before starting a Render, staying in material or rendered preview mode will require more resources, because your PC is trying to render and display the scene at the same time.
It's a good idea to use the render workspace, a simple clean workspace not requiring extra resources.
Thanks for the great advice! I never thought of it like that and when I modeled the helmets I was going for photorealistic instead of polygon count efficient. I might be stuck with the longer cycles render times after all.
I have tested the one by one approach and unfortunately as soon as I add the model it already happens. I'm not sure if it's the polygon count or the complex materials, but I don't think it'll work for me to start the whole modeling process over. Cycles it is 🤷🏻♀️
Since I was testing different solutions I also downloaded the alpha version of 4.2. And while Eevee crashes right away like on the stable version, Eevee next doesn't. Not sure what the under the hood reason is, but I might play with rendering on both engines to see if I can find a middle ground.
Thank you all again for giving me lots of tips on this troubleshooting. Next time I know to account for it from the get-go.
There are some limitations with EEVEE, like number of Lights, but also complex Materials (many Nodes). EEVEE Next should have less problems with those.
I don't think you have too many Lights, so it's probable that your Materials are too complex for the 'old' EEVEE.
You could also consider using Cycles and a Render Farm...