TG2 Render crashes at large resolution

[Mohawk20]

I have a problem with TG2 crashing during render.
I have made a game-board for a 4-person chess game. It's a square island, with a village on each side (the obj's are medium large, 150Mb total). It has to be printed at 60x60 cm, at 300 dpi. So the resolution has to be 6670x6670.
However, TG2 crashed each time I tried to render. I've tried rendering small crops, I've tried lowering the resolution to 2257x2257, and rendering small crops of that. I also played with the bucket size and set the Subdiv cache to the highest value of the slider.
I run Win7 64-bit, and TG2 64-bit, and I have 12Gb RAM, so large renders should not be a problem...

Terragen crashed each time with a crash report. It's in the attachments, except the .mdmp file, that's too large, and the .xml file, that's not accepted.

Does anyone know what the problem could be?

[Oshyan]

I don't think that crash report tells us much (Jo or Matt may take a look and see otherwise though). When it crashes, is there any error message, does TG just freeze and go non-responsive or does it actually just disappear, or what? Does it happen immediately, or only after some time? What are your render quality settings? Have you monitored the memory usage while rendering to see how high it goes?

By the way, increasing subdiv cache will pretty much never make it *more* stable or better-able to render something. We're considering even removing the option to adjust it as it is mostly misunderstood and seldom needs to actually be changed manually.

- Oshyan

[Mohawk20]

There are 2 more files in the crash report, but they are not accepted as attachments here. I'll try to put them on-line another way.
In answer on your other questions:
TG2 freezes with an error message, saying something went wrong, and that I can see the details in the report files.
That happens after quite some time. Depending on the resolution and settings it can be some 4 to 10 hours before it crashes.
I've done overnight renders, so I don't know what the memory usage was on crashing...
Render quality has to be 1, lower doesn't look good enough.

[Andrew March]

That sounds more like a windows error rather than an application error.

What are your system specs?

[Mohawk20]

I have Win7 64-Bit, with a 3Ghz quad-core processor and 12Gb 800hz ddr2 RAM.
I also run the 64-Bt version of TG2...

[Mohawk20]

Here are links to all the crash report files:
Munidump
.xml file

[Oshyan]

Memory usage should not increase dramatically after an hour or so, I would think (depends on the scene though). Have you checked memory use after some period of rendering? Would it be possible for you to share the scene (you can email directly to support AT planetside.co.uk).

- Oshyan

[Mohawk20]

For those of you following this thread:
Oshyan looked at my scene file, and he discovered that the micro-exporter was still active. I used that to export a low-res terrain to model the villages on, but forgot to turn it of when I cranked up the quality. Exporting terrain at 1 detail is not a good idea! So I started a render without the micro-exporter. So far so good...

[Mohawk20]

Nope, crashed again.
"This program has encountered an error and has to close."

Doe anyone know how to interpret a mdmp file?

[jo]

Hi,

Only we'll be able to really interpret the minidump file because you need the source code to do that. Even so I'm not sure we'll be able to make much sense of it at this time.

If it's possible for you to gather the project and put it somewhere it can be downloaded I'd be happy to try it and see where it crashes. You can email me the link at jomeder@planetside.co.uk.

Regards,

Jo

[Mohawk20]

Jo found the real problem: a bug in the extensive use of painted shaders. This project is usefull in fixing the bug, so yay!
However, in the mean time this project is not going to be finished, unless someone has an idea for a workaround...

Is there a way to export painted shaders, or an approximation of them?
If so, would using image maps give the same result (more or less)?
because I used the painted shaders to make the shape of the island, several parts for coverage of grass, desert, rocks, etc. and rivers. So top-projected images could give similar results, right?

[Oshyan]

You can't export Painted Shaders at present, but hopefully Jo can resolve the underlying issue and fix your problem, as well as improve things for others.

- Oshyan