T2 on Linux

[chris_x422]

Just wondering if anyone here has much experience of running terragen 2 in wine on linux.

We have it running and rendering from the command line for rendering, but it seems it will only render on one core.
Multi-threading under wine is obviously a common issue, anyone here got around that?

Would be great to hear from anyone who has had it working.

Chris

[cyphyr]

Hey Chris hows it going
If its only rendering on one core I doubt your seeing any real advantage to using linux. Could you not launch multiple instances of TG. Manual setup and probably wouldn't play well with a farm manager but more working cores is better than less
Cheers
Richard

[chris_x422]

Hey Richard,

Hope you're keeping well.

Back end of a project here, so pretty tired but happy.

Sadly, Our farm would require loads more licenses (of tractor) to run that many more instances, making it not very cost effective or efficient.
We just have so much hardware at the studio that is tied to linux and it would be great to be able to utilise the extra power.
At the moment I'm limited to a small number of macs, and unfortunately outsourcing the rendering has also proved to be too expensive.

Cheers

Chris

[MGebhart]

Chris,

Terragen is problematic using Wine. In fact my opinion of Wine is low.

As you saw in my Ubuntu and Windows post I use VBox however, there is still a hardware issue. Meaning, Vbox has it's own hardware definitions so as an example you can't load Nvidia drivers for your graphics card.

I think when you boil it down, if your are doing serious projects using Terragen,  just stay with Windows.

Most of my Terragen work is to test tree models so my solution works fine and does not require a ton of processing.

[Matt]

Just wondering if anyone here has much experience of running terragen 2 in wine on linux.

We have it running and rendering from the command line for rendering, but it seems it will only render on one core.
Multi-threading under wine is obviously a common issue, anyone here got around that?

Is it because Terragen detects only one core through your setup, or is Wine really limited to only one core? If you increase the minimum and maximum threads in render settings, does it go faster?

FWIW, I did work on a project where all threads were utilised through Wine, but I don't remember the details. It was a couple of years ago.

Matt

[chris_x422]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Terragen is problematic using Wine. In fact my opinion of Wine is low.

A view also shared by our tech team, and being restricted to 32 bit is also a massive hindrance.

Cheers Matt,
Scene files were set to use more cores, and comparison times were compared with the same scene running on macs.
Shame you don't recall the build of wine you were using, but may also be a case of the flavour of linux too.
The tech team may yet look into a beta build of wine that might address the issue, but in the long run it looks like a poor option compared to windows. Unfortunately, the whole film pipeline is built around linux, and having a dual/triple OS environment is no small undertaking.

We were really up against it when we were testing all of this, and terragen came in to the show quite late on.
Thankfully though, the studio are so impressed with the results that they are looking at supporting terragen on a better platform.
We ended up leasing out a load of mac pro's for extra power.

Thanks again

Chris

[cyphyr]

Not sure if you've seen this thread yet.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=14398.0
Relevant?
Richard