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While rendering (using Cycles) 750 frames of fluid simulation as PNG files, my computer crashed. Blender was up to frame 102 when things crashed.

I reopened Blender to restart the rendering with frame 103, but it starts rendering as though it was on frame 1.

The error reported by Windows was:

Event ID: 41 The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

What do I need to do to get the renderer to recognize where it was in the rendering process?

If I need to bake the simulation to start rendering from frame 103, can that baked simulation be included in the packaged Blender file so I can use it on another computer?

Blender Setup:

Cycles Render Devices set to CUDA with both graphics card and CPU selected

Image Sequence->Overwrite deselected

Denoiser: OptiX

Device: GPU Compute

Max Samples: 2048

Computer specs:

Eluktronics Prometheus XVII

Intel i7 10875H

NVIDIA RTX 3070 Laptop GPU

32 GB DDR4 RAM

Laptop set to "Beast Mode" so that NVIDIA card is exclusively used.

edsager
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  • Yes ... you have to bake fluid sim cache. BTW you have nicely structured and asked your Question, but you could use the same amount of time to do a simple test with default Cube and "Quick Liquid" to answer your self :) Note: Simulation Cache is baked into separate folder (you can set the path under properties) ... so if rendered on another pc you have to move it together. Or you can Export sim as Alembic file and import Mesh back into blend file – vklidu Jun 13 '22 at 06:19
  • As a best practice, ALWAYS bake your physics sims into an external cache before rendering. :) Whether it's complex fluids/smoke or simple particles stuff - if you ever need to pause/restart your rendering (or even if not), rendering without baking first may have unpredictable results. – Onyx Jun 13 '22 at 09:42
  • @vklidu, I am unsure how a "Quick Liquid" simulation would have helped. It is moot because although I was able to finally bake stuff (software crashed 3 times previously), laptop crashed while rendering.

    It appears that I have no working graphics card to completely render my project and cannot access laptop files. Laptop was due to be backed up about 10 hours after it crashed. Anyway, vklidu, you were the first to respond with the answer and I would like to select your answer as THE answer if you would not mind changing your response to an answer.

    Thank you both for your assistance.

     – edsager Jun 14 '22 at 10:03

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