Pixel plow problem - GI takes forever or doesn't recognize

Started by Kitubijalec, January 06, 2017, 12:37:11 PM

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Kitubijalec

Hi!

I'm very new to Terragen and maybe this is a really simple problem, however I couldn't find any topic on this.
I have gathered an animation project in Terragen 4 with a GI cache and sent it via their agent for test. For this purpose it was only 25 frames with simple render settings (detail 0.2, aa 2, 1280x720 and 3 GI cache files), so I could calculate an approximate time and cost that full render would take.

I set the render node to read the first GI cache image that I've made and clicked Gather project. That first file (temp1_gicache.0001.tggic) was listed under project assets. Overall project size was 21 MB when submitted.

When submitting I had to enter GI frame range - I suppose at this point it should automatically detect my pre-made GI cache? I set frame range to 1 to 25 and GI frame range to 1 to 25 by 10, as in original project.

The upload went ok and now I am stuck at GI pass, with no frames rendered at all, for a few hours. Farm load is not near full. "Cost consumed" tab is the only thing that seems to be going somewhere, as it is now at $4.25.

I have no idea what I did wrong. Actually I did a few tests of which the first one went fine and gave me 25 frames. Sadly I don't remember what my settings were, but I am sure I had also provided GI cache, but strangely it just worked. I got 25 frames in 15 minutes. Next four tries resulted in the same GI pass limbo.

Does anybody have any idea? Please help!

Kitubijalec

Ok, I got a quick response from Pixel Plow support. In the gathered project, there were two cameras and when I opened project an error message also came up. Anyway, I didn't notice this because I never opened the gathered projects.

Oshyan

Glad you got that problem resolved. I would also mention that (if I understand what you did correctly), PixelPlow is not using your pre-rendered GI Cache, probably because you did not include all the .gic files. Instead it sounds like you included just 1 file. That will probably result in PixelPlow trying to calculate the GI cache themselves. Which is not a problem really, it just incurs more time and cost (not much because GI caches are quicker than renders to generate in almost all cases).

If you want to generate your GI caches locally, you'll end up with a lot of data to upload. If you have a fast connection this is fine (PixelPlow does not charge for upload time, as far as I know). But you do need to make sure to include all the .gic files, not just the first one you generate.

- Oshyan