Beta 4 crashing when clicking on "Library", worked before and suddenly crashes

decksounds13 · July 27, 2016, 05:59:14 PM

I tried bringing procedural grass into my scene but suddenly the program crashes when I click the Library button. I tried repairing the installation but no dice. Btw I am new to TG and am very impressed. I will be buying the final version without question.

ajcgi · July 28, 2016, 05:23:11 AM

I've only ever had this when I install a new alpha version of TG without installing the old one first.
Have you installed Terragen, then installed it again for some reason?

Dune · July 28, 2016, 09:29:15 AM

I don't use the library. That's all I want to say.
What if you uninstall through configuration, delete all Planetside folders and stuff (to make sure) and install again?

Oshyan · July 30, 2016, 04:58:23 PM

You can try deleting the Library database in the Preferences. See if that helps. It's possible that it auto-added something to the library that is causing an issue (it is set by default to add any imported item to the library automatically, I believe).

- Oshyan

decksounds13 · July 31, 2016, 12:18:51 AM

Dune, do you do all of your grass with populations and if so how do you handle large scenes? I am actually using your free grass and in my current scene I am exceeding my current ram specifications for a population of instances spaced .2 at 3000x5000. I can populate but when I go to render it quickly climbs up to my limit and then the program just kind of hangs there. My thoughts with the library was that I could use populations/proxies up close and try to match the look of the foreground with procedural grass in the distance to save memory and time at render.

Oshyan, thank you. I will try that to see if it helps.

edit: It worked, I can get into the Library now but how do I restore the factory assets? I tried another re-install but it didn't put them back. Thank you again.

Dune · July 31, 2016, 02:05:09 AM

Populating has nothing to do with using the library or not. The library is 'just' an easy way to find stuff. But I have a well (

) organized folder system, where I can find what I need without the library. After having some initial trouble with the library, I shoved it aside.

A population that large is doomed to use too much memory. I always plant my populations in a square in front of the camera, the most efficient way, and after a few K it will have to be 'taken over' by procedural colors/displacements. My last grass is often not more than 500m from the camera, or it takes 1. ages to populate, and 2. crash my system. I also sometimes use a distance shader to gradually merge my last grasses thinning out into procedural grass, so avoiding a hard edge.

decksounds13 · July 31, 2016, 03:28:54 PM

Hi Dune, or is it Ulco? Thanks so much for the reply, that is exactly what I was hoping to hear concerning your approach. It's exactly what I am attempting to do. The only reason I tried doing it all with populations was because I couldn't access the Library to get to the procedural grass. Now that I followed Oshyan's advice the Library is empty so now I am working on getting the factory assets back in there.

Do you mind me asking how you access the procedural shaders without the library?

Oshyan · July 31, 2016, 06:03:20 PM

The library doesn't come pre-populated as far as I know. To add the presets into the library you just scan the folder you extracted them to with the "Scan Folder for Library Items" option in the Library itself.

- Oshyan

Kadri · July 31, 2016, 06:23:21 PM

Quote from: decksounds13 on July 31, 2016, 03:28:54 PM
...
Do you mind me asking how you access the procedural shaders without the library?

You don't need the library for that. You can load a TGC, TGD, OBJ file or whatever from Terragen without the library.
In fact i don't use the library at all. If you like to use the library that is another thing of course.

decksounds13 · July 31, 2016, 06:34:18 PM

Kadri, thank you for the reply...but what windows directory are the Library assets contained in (i.e. the procedural grass)? I can't seem to track them down after following Oshyan's advice above.

Oshyan · July 31, 2016, 06:43:14 PM

The assets are downloaded separately from Terragen and installed by extracting them manually. So... they are wherever you yourself extracted them to.

You can Search your computer for them or if all else fails just redownload and extract to a logical place for you.

- Oshyan

decksounds13 · July 31, 2016, 06:47:00 PM

Haha, well that is embarrassing.

I have installed so much stuff in the past two months that I forgot they were downloaded separately! I found them so thank you kindly, sir.

Oshyan · July 31, 2016, 10:32:26 PM

No problem, glad we were able to resolve it.

- Oshyan

Dune · August 01, 2016, 03:48:20 AM

Procedural grass.... there is actually no such thing. You have the internal grass clump, which is an object/population that can be accessed from within Terragen. You need to color that inside the object. Good stuff for a bit of distance. Then you have all sorts of object based grasses that you can load from wherever you put them. And then you have a procedural setup to fake grass, which is based on nodes that are all available from within TG. You can build from scratch using a few stretched tiny fake stones (height 10, size 0.005) + some colors. The higher tyhe detail settings of the render the better the 'fake grass' looks. Good for distance! There are also presets (node combinations) available for 'procedural grass' in the form of tgc's. Those should be inported (rightclick in node area... import clipfile`), and then inserted in the right spot. Usually as a child to a surface layer where slope and heights, masked or not, are set.
I hope this helps with the 'misunderstanding'.