Blender & tens of thousands of objects

[Chiaroscuro]

I'm responding to a PM here about Blender crashing with tens of thousands of objects in case it's useful to others.

I don't use a special build of Blender or Bullet Physics (it is a 64-bit version); but yes, although there isn't really a limit with Bullet Physics, Blender itself is not well suited to handle tens of thousands of discrete objects.

For the 32200 objects (simple instanced cuboids) scene I had to hide Blender's outliner window and also hide (obj.hide / eye icon) 90% of the objects from the 3D view otherwise Blender would slow to a crawl (probably crash). 10% of the objects was enough for me to set/understand the scene, place/keyframe the camera, etc. and have a responsive 3D view. I actually think the outliner window may be one of the biggest issues with Blender and so many objects, besides the fact that adding more objects gets real slow when there are already so many.

There are many challenges to make this work smoothly in Blender. I was thinking of implementing "physics arrays", which would work like particle systems, but for instanced rigid body dynamics shapes instead. The advantage is this would appear as just "one" object to Blender.
Problem is that I work on this for fun, in my own time, when I feel like it, so my progress on my physics tools is very slow; I haven't even started to tackle this problem yet.

Your situation with over 2000 compounded rigid bodies, depending on how many each is composed of, will start to push Blender's limits. Unfortunately I don't have a simple solution for you yet. To test I just tried 2500 rings in a chainmail (8 capsule segments per ring + mesh = 22500 objs) and it gets real slow in Blender, but it's still working. If you have the patience to deal with Blender being slow, perhaps try hiding the outliner window and a large portion of the objects as I mention above to see if that helps. (ps. I unchecked "Instance all Objects" for SLG so that it exports only one actual instance.)

[B.Y.O.B.]

Is it enough to hide the objects with H key and close the outliner or is python needed?

I also observed a slow down of Blender with many objects in a recent project (I had about 300 clocks instanced, each consisting of about 4 objects), primarily when adding/removing the layer with the objects (the clocks), but not so strong when working on the scene. It was still usable, only switching layers took some time.

[Chiaroscuro]

Is it enough to hide the objects with H key and close the outliner

Yes, certainly. Although without the outliner window, it may be a little more difficult to do some things, so, yes, also I do personally fall back a lot on Python commands to get things done; to me there is also just so much more power with them.

[Meelis]

I just yesterday rendered in Blender Internal wireframe of my scene that included 10 000 instanced waterdrops eatch 20 000 triangles.

Blender filled all my memory and reached under few minutes to 30 000 MB
Same Scene in LuxRender with compex materials and HDR map, takes 2,3 Gb

[Rhys]

I think Blender need to refocus and optimize itself all round. I really hope after the major features that are coming in now (bmesh etc), that blender will get tightened, stabilised and optimized to a large degree, in regards to performance/processing/objects and also user experience.
So often I find myself waiting for blender to process something (Make duplicates from particles real,unwrapping, proportional editing, modifiers etc) whilst is uses 10% of my cpu and goes into not responding with spinning circle and white screen.
What's the hold up? Your using 3gb of my 16gb ram, 10% of my processor and my graphics card is idling but you cannot handle our objects, vertices or modifier stack.

[areandres]

It is really a big problem for me. I tryed to make a scene with more then 20.000 rings for my chainmail.
But i can not do. The problem is really when i start a test how the rings fall down and react with other object
blender is not useable.
I put my chainmail scene on ice

I hope near the future there will be a chance to solve this point.

It would be better to move the rigid body system from game engine to blender physics.

Happy easter

[Chiaroscuro]

It would be better to move the rigid body system from game engine to blender physics.

I heard someone was working on this, I think it was a GSOC project... found it: http://aligorith.blogspot.ca/
Perhaps give it a try if you can find a download for that branch.
Unfortunately I have yet to get around to try it myself.

[areandres]

It would be better to move the rigid body system from game engine to blender physics.

I heard someone was working on this, I think it was a GSOC project... found it: http://aligorith.blogspot.ca/
Perhaps give it a try if you can find a download for that branch.
Unfortunately I have yet to get around to try it myself.

Thanks for the tip.
When i got some news i will post it.

For better understanding the problem is not only the count of object.
The problem is also when you start the game engine and record the animation with keys.
It is imposible to use Blender. Better would be an baking option.

Greets