Blender rollercoaster

 Yesterday, there were some ups and some downs. I was invited to help test a patch release for True-Terrain 5. Richard suggests that there are some issues with the latest Blender release. They've been seeing memory leaks and crashes. I agree. Weirdly, as soon as True-VFX posted a warning about the need for a patch, I started to get crashes. Apparently, these are the Blender crashes.

About dinnertime, we got the patch to test, along with test steps:

1. Install the patch, restart
2. Create a terrain
3. Create a scatter system
4. Add a preset. The "Bushy Forest" was specified.
5. Save the scene
6. Render the scene.

If the steps don't result in a crash, then the issue if fixed.

I got mixed results. Some test renders crashed, and sometimes, it was okay. This suggests that the Blender 4.3 issue is still going to be there.

Test 6 of "A series of unfortunate crashes"

Just as serious as the crashes, this scatter caused my system to become extremely unresponsive. It really did feel like my Blender installed had been borked by the new build of the add-on. When the scatter, which is relatively small, was enabled in viewport, it would crush my GPU, which would go straight to 100% utilisation and freeze my system up.

In the end, the test build was judged a success. The patch should be released today.

Further testing

To ensure that everything was actually running okay, I did a couple more test scenes.

A tree too far...

I dropped a tree in from my "Nature Assets" library. This is a collection of very high-detail plant models that I got before there were asset libraries and complex scatter tools. It was from a site that specialised in supplying the Arcvis industry. Anyway, the tree I dropped in (that turned out to be a massive file) caused my 24GB VRAM to get swallowed up whole. I restarted and added a small scatter from True-Terrain 5. It worked! It even worked with grass scatters using Geoscatter.

Last thing last night

There was brief speculation that my recently added Photographer 5 add-on was causing my instability, so I removed it. After testing, I wanted to see if there were any issues I could qualify with my own testing. I built a quick scene and used Photographer 5 features to make the renders look more punchy.

The good news is that Photographer 5 doesn't appear to have issues. The scene was stable!
I absolutely must watch tutorials for Photographer 5. It looks great; it looks like a "where the hell have you been all my life" level of great.

This morning

I played with sculpting for the first time in a zillion years. Weird thing:

Weird crawly thing...