Crashes
The most common causes of Blender crashes:
Firstly, you may be able to recover your work with File ‣ Recover ‣
Auto Save….
To prevent the problem from happening again, you can check that the
graphics drivers are up to date (Graphics Hardware), upgrade your
machine’s hardware (the RAM or graphics card), and disable some
options that are more memory intensive:
Reduce undo steps Preferences ‣ System ‣ Memory & Limits ‣ Undo Steps.
Using multisample anti-aliasing also increases the memory usage and
makes the display slower.
On Linux, the Window Manager (KDE and Gnome for example) may be using
hardware accelerated effects (e.g. window shadows and transparency)
that are using up the memory that Blender needs. Try disabling the
desktop effects or switch to a lightweight Window Manager.
To check memory usage by Blender:
On Windows, use Task Manager and sort by Memory.
On macOS, use Activity Monitor.app and open Memory tab. Alternatively,
run top -o MEM
.
On Linux, run top -o %MEM
.
Crash Log
When Blender crashes, it writes out a text file which
contains information that may help identify the cause of the crash.
Usually, this file is written in the Temporary Directory directory.
This file contains a log of tools used up until the crash as well as
some other debug information. When reporting bugs about crashes it can
be helpful to attach this file to your reports, especially when others
are unable to reproduce the crash.
Windows
On a crash, a file is written based on the name of the
currently loaded blend-file, so test.blend will create a file called
test.crash.txt
.
Batch scripts are provided in Blender installation directory which may
be run to obtain the Blender debug log and system info text files:
blender_debug_log.cmd
is used in most cases.
blender_debug_gpu.cmd
and blender_debug_gpu_workaround.cmd
log
GPU-related errors.
blender_factory_startup.cmd
starts Blender with default settings which
is recommended for debugging.
If the crash happens in Blender module, stack trace is also written to
a file named blender.crash.txt
. The path to that file can be found at
the end of blender_debug_log.txt
file.
MacOS
After crash, macOS Crash Reporter shows a window with backtrace
after some time, or when Blender is opened again. Copy the text in the
crash report and save it in a text file. That file should be attached
to the bug report while following other bug reporting guidelines.
Some .crash
files can also be found in
~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/
with the name of format:
Blender_YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS_MACNAME.crash
. If a report is present
corresponding to the time of crash, that file can also provide hints
about cause of the crash. Alternatively, Console.app can be used to
navigate all “User Reports” (see sidebar in the app).
Linux
On a crash, a file named blender.crash.txt
is written in /tmp
directory.
Note
More logs can be obtained by running Blender from Command Line and
using:
--factory-startup --debug-all flags
See Launching from the Command Line and Command Line Arguments.