A currently processing subdivision of a mesh should automatically cancel itself if it cannot succeed due to lack of memory
I don't know if this is possible, but I'm just going to post it and see what happens.
If an artist executes a subdivide and it hangs Blender in a state that cannot be cancelled or undone due to the artist not being able to predict how much memory it will use (no one can), and in conjunction with autosave not actually saving Edit Mode or Sculpt Mode changes, the artist can lose a lot of work.
The latter issue should have a MASSIVE WARNING in the user preferences menu and not just as a mouse hover gotcha note.
So the artist doesn't have enough RAM. Too bad, I guess? Well, Blender will now be sitting there, unclickable, filling up available memory to some maximum level, then purge its usage, whereby it will continually fill up memory again and loop this state until the user ends the process through Task Manager. It didn't happen to me, but it might actually crash Windows, possibly, which is even worse, especially if unsaved work was done outside of Blender as well.
This is awful. If there is any possible way of preventing this, please do so. Just a GIANT NOTE in User Preferences would be greatly appreciated for anyone else that uses the program and doesn't take the time to hover the mouse cursor over the Autosave toggle to see the note.
7 Comments
In general Blender should have some more safeguards against using massive amounts of RAM and starting operations that will take forever to complete.
While this might not be that hard to code, this is also a typical beginner's problem. Subdividing isn't the proper way to smooth things out. you should not use it for that, take Suzan don't subdivide beyond 2 there is not much to gain after it. supper smooth becomes more visual in materials one applies. It becomes problematic if you would like to reuse a few of such objects in other drawings, its better to keep in mind your mesh size.
* @peter.boos * It is not a beginners problem when one misclick can crash Blender. Easy example is Voxel remesh. One wrong click or typo in voxels size and Blender will die. Another simple example. You work on a car using traditional subdiv modeling. But you already made a tire in Zbrush and imported into Bnender.. You select part of your car and accidentally select that tire too. You apply subdiv modifier and Blender dies again
* @zelfit * This is a problem with Blender's UI in general, and something that has been discussed here: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/83fbbc/
Better handling of hanging and allowing users to cancel out of long operations is something that would universally benefit everybody
* @peter.boos * Subdivision, whether through the subdivision modifier, multiresolution modifier, dyntopo, or the voxel remesher are quintessential to sculpting, of which Blender is quite capable. Attempting to sweep this under the rug as a "beginner's problem" is just pointless. The simple question is this: Is it better to have a failsafe for something the user cannot predict or not? If such a failsafe existed, would you feel better about Blender or not? Ultimately, I see no reason not to explore/implement this kind of feature.
* @DigThroughTheDitches * blender.community/c/rightclickselect/B7gbbc/
It should cancel after 10-15 secs or user defined like tdr delay in windows.