technically it's not a bug

[TheBadger]

But its pissing me off just as much! 

Hello, and welcome to a very irritated post.


Ok so previously I moved some folders around on my HD. cleaned it up a bit you know.
Than I quickly forgot about doing it.

So tonight I decided to render a new version of an older project, having forgotten about the folders I thought doing this would be rather quick. Click render, and, 804 errors later I can now make this complaint and ask a question.

Complaint:
I could not stop the error box from counting out all the missing textures for the objects in the T2 file. I had to sit there or force quit. And since I did not save my changes for this render I just sat there... Very worried it would go on forever. Thankfully it did not.
I am not sure anything can be done, but if this happens again, is there a way to force quit the error box?

The important question!:
Now I now where the objects folder is, and I know where my textures are. But there are a lot of missing texture errors. Please tell me there is a way that T2 can go get all those textures without me having to do it one by one???!??!??! Please please please.


Thank you 

[jo]

Hi Michael,

I don't quite understand your problem with the Errors and Warnings (E&W) window. When was this coming up? When you opened the project or when you started the render?

I thought we had some documentation for the E&W window but I can't track it down now. The idea of it is not to get in your way but it will pop back up again if a new error occurs. You will just have to wait for whatever process (loading a project perhaps in this case) it is that's causing the errors to finish. For example with a project you cannot cancel project loading so you would have to wait for it to finish anyway. I don't think it's the E&W window that's the problem here.

Before the E&W window you might have had 804 messages boxes pop up which would all have to be dismissed individually. That really would be a pain.

To address your second question, go to the Preferences and select the Library and Content panel. Add your objects folder to the User Content Folders section using the Add Folder button. Next time you open the project TG should find all the files. There's not really any way to permanently update your project though. The easiest way is actually using a text editor. The project files are XML, text in other words, so it's possible to do a find and replace on the file to change paths.

Regards,

Jo

[Dune]

I made a habit of NEVER changing the folders I have my stuff (objects) in, or old renders can't find them. Hope you can reverse your action.... put the folders back?

[jaf]

I had some luck recovering when I did something similar.  Look at the path in the error message and then edit your tgd file using search and replace.  Of course the search and replace shouldn't use any of the actual texture names -- just the folder names where they reside.  If you have numerous (different) folders this probably will be more difficult.

So, if I have my textures in c:\terragen\textures and I change my locations to d:\newFolder\textureSet1 and fire up TG2 to render a scene, I would get those errors you saw.  So I would make a quick backup of my tgd file and then load my editor (try Sublime -- it's great) and do a search and replace:  search for "c:\terragen\textures" and replace with "d:\newFolder\textureSet1".   This should work and wouldn't change the actual texture file names.  Of course if your using numerous locations, you would have to repeat this until all of the errors go away.

I happen to like copying all my textures into a single folder (my scene folder -- this is a nice feature that Poseray has with exporting an obj.) 

You can also do a "Export Gathered Project" from TG2 which will consolidate the scene assets to a folder.

[TheBadger]

Thanks for getting back to me on this one so fast guys!

@jo

I don't quite understand your problem with the Errors and Warnings (E&W) window. When was this coming up? When you opened the project or when you started the render?

When I clicked render. Only when I click render.
That is normal in my exsperence. I just never had so many before and it counted them out one by one.
I feel its important to give more context for you though. The project is my original MazeWorld with ivy So whatever normal problems I could have they are compounded by huge memory use slowing everything down. (with or with out ivy, its rendering very fast from this new view now though). But puting those textures back one by one would be torture . It was torture getting them all in the first time .

Jo, please tell me about the new content library, will it be of benefit in a situation like this? How so? And if not in the initial release, perhaps something can be done in the future to make fixing a broken link faster. But yes, I realize this issue in this instance is 100% my fault, and not a "bug" or something.
But I expect this occurs often. But people just don't bring it up because with a small number of plants its easy to fix, and also, its our fault and not the soft's.

@Dune, Jaff
I am going through all of the suggestions and trying the one I think is easiest first. And I'll keep going till I find what works best for me. THANK YOU guys! I only fear the text edit option a bit, because I have no experience using a editor to go through code, not really anyway.


I always do these stupid mistakes!

[choronr]

If making these changes, your path to them changes - thus, when opening an older .tgd file with all its image maps, objects and etc. will give you errors. You've got to get it right in the beginning; or else, you've got a lot of work on your hands.

[TheBadger]

I got it working. As suggested I simply looked for where the soft was searching for the textures, and moved them there.

I understood how to create a new path. My problem was that I thought I would have to do this one at a time (in order to preserve the current location) but I decided it was not an issue to just move the textures to where Terragen expected to find them.

So the only real problems are that I could not stop the count out of all 800 textures. Though for normal error messages its not a problem because its just a few (normally). But also to be fair, this particular scene uses a lot of GB! So it went slower than it would otherwise. my whole system slows when I work on this and I have 32GB.

The other problem, is just that it would be nice if it were possible to locate all the textures from terragen rather than one at a time. I suspect the content manager will go a long way to making things better in this regard... Just in terms of my managing those assets that I really only use with Terragen.

Thanks again guys. The render is going now.

Cheers.

[Dune]

What would be handy, I now realize (and did realize before, but never mentioned) is that if you have to refresh a file or look for a specific file, its name is already in the space where it's supposed to be and you only have to find the right folder. Instead of having to type that name in again (and exact). Does that make sense? In objects for instance, when you want a leaf reentered. I did found out that you can copy paste the leaf name from the color tab to the opacity tab and it works... I used to search for it again in that tab. Takes much more trouble.

[TheBadger]

Oh yeah, one last thing.

I forgot to tell you Jo, that the files object were all turned off. I learned pretty fast that I could not work in that project with everything turned on, I always saved it with objects hidden. So thats probably why I did not get a warning until I hit render... If that better explains an answer to your question?