Busy, busy, busy...

[PabloMack]

I have a couple of scenes with milions of instances of plants and I am seeing the processor so busy that it rarely responds to user interface input. Even after the prerender says it is finished, the processor is regularly tied up doing something with the populations when, ostensibly, it should be finished. When I disable the populations, the program becomes very responsive and I don't have this problem. This lack of responsiveness when there are large populations is troublesome and I wish I could do something to mitigate it. Sometimes, when there are a number of populations to disable, it takes a long time to even respond to clicking the disable box. The whole process of just disabling the populations so that I can get some changes made can take several minutes. Then I dread going through the reverse process of re-enabling all of the populations to do a render. Is there a single box somewhere that can temporarily disable ALL populations?

[fleetwood]

I've found that I need to avoid the Objects tab as much as I can. I do all object enabling, adjusting, etc. by opening the objects from the node network. Leaving the Terragen window with the Objects tab selected seems to run the processor nearly constantly, (perhaps always updating the small object displays?). I usually leave the main Terragen window on the Terrain tab to avoid the constant object processing/reprocessing.

[jo]

Hi,

Can you please clarify what you mean by "prerender"?

Regards,

Jo

[PabloMack]

The preview...sorry. When it is finished, it says it is done rendering. So "preview render" became contracted to "prerender".

[mhall]

Weeeell ... if you were feeling particularly adventurous the TGD files are just text files ... A small tool could be written to inspect the file, list the available populations and let you enable/disable (all/one/some of) them. Then you can use the File > Revert to Saved function to re-load the file.

At least, it looks that way after a very cursory inspection ... I created a TGD with a couple of populations, opened the TGD in a text editor, changed the "enabled" value of the populator_v4 node from "1" to "0" saved the file and then used Revert to Saved in TG3and the populations were disabled in the Node Editor.

Of course, before running such a tool, you'd want to save your scene so that manual edits to the file made by the tool included the latest data and Revert to Saved would reflect them ...

Anyway ... when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail ... and I've been doing a lot of scripting lately, so it's the first thing I thought of. As a matter of fact, I have most of that tool written in the form of a small TGD file inspector and value incrementor I wrote last year when there was talk of putting together references of what small, incremental changes of values looked like. I never deployed it (a couple of reasons being that it will only work on Windows and another being that I can't sign my code ... I only write for myself and I trust me but I don't expect others to!. ).

Regards,
~Micheal

[zaxxon]

I agree. Working with dense populations really affects the screen redraw - of course. Having multiple strategies to select viewport display types is certainly something that I would like. I have a decent machine i4930 6 core/32 gigs 2 gigddr5 video card, but I've pretty much maxed out the screen load at this point and as stated the current selection options can be a bid tedious and time consuming. Something like a sort of a Hotkey, that globally enables/disables pops, or maybe even a spreadsheet window to select individual obj/pop display options. Still, the viewport response since the last revision has improved tremendously, much more facile!

[Oshyan]

It sounds like many of you are just running into fundamental graphics performance limitations. You're trying to display millions of objects on screen in realtime, interactively. It's a tough challenge. There are options to globally enable and disable previewing of populations when you're in the Objects layout, on the Node List on the left (gear icon). Perhaps that helps.

As to performance being just generally bad when on the Objects tab, this is almost certainly due to the 3D preview of objects that shows up when you're on that tab/Layout. Again this is a fundamental graphics performance limitation. You can close that preview with the little blue rectangle to its upper left (between the preview window and the node list), and that should help performance. Other than that there should be *no difference* between viewing objects in that layout vs. others or vs. opening them in the node network.

- Oshyan