Blender crashes during rendering or exporting animations.

[OmarEmaraDev]

What is the issue?

Blender crashes during rendering or exporting animations implemented using Animation Nodes. The crash is not always reproducible, but it seems highly reproducible in certain cases. In particular, when Animation Nodes is adding/removing objects or altering object data such as meshes or splines.

Why haven't we fixed this issue yet?

The issue is caused by an upstream Blender bug, or rather, a design limitation. Consequently, there wasn't much we can do. However, we are currently looking into possible workarounds to mitigate the issue.

What can I do to render my animation?

To render your animation, you may try to use one of the following methods. Non of the methods are guaranteed to work, but they proved effective in many situations.

Background Render

You may try to render the animation in the background (Without the UI). To do so, execute blender from the terminal/console using the -b flag. For instance:

blender -b filename.blend -a

For more details and examples, see the Blender man page.

Render Individual Frames

You may try to render frames individually using the following script:

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene
render = scene.render
directory = render.filepath

for i in range(scene.frame_start, scene.frame_end):
    scene.frame_set(i)
    render.filepath = f"{directory}{i:05d}"
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still = True)

render.filepath = directory 

The script render frames from Start Frame to End Frame and saves them in the scene's file path directory.

[juangea]

Shouldn't this be fixed already in latest 2.81?

I think I remember Sergey solved the culprip bug about this, but there could still be some crashes, but those crashes were solved enabling "lock interface" while rendering.

[OmarEmaraDev]

@juangea We are still not sure if what Sergey did actually solved the issue. In Animation Nodes, we use timers for automatic execution, while Sergey was talking about handlers. Some users also reported that the crashes still happen. I tried couple of tests scenes and Blender crashed even with "Lock Interface" enabled. However, it never crashed when using the two methods outlined above.
Can you try some scenes and report back?

[samytichadou]

Hi, would it be a good idea to make a kind of "poor boy render operator" based on this kind of frame by frame script shipping with AN ? In case users can't render in a classic way their animation without crash, there would be a simple out of the box solution !

[OmarEmaraDev]

@samytichadou I guess we can consider that. But I am planning on diving deeper into the problem at some point because even the described methods don't work all the time.