Low level Cumulus not showing Terragen 4.4.4 Mac OS

[james adamson]

Hi all.
I have built a scene in Terragen 4.4.44. I have a couple of questions.

1. When I add a low level cloud layer of any type it would not show up in my preview. I tried the mid level preset and that worked fine, does anyone have any idea why this is? (I did hide my scenery and play with the height controls. No low level cloud.)

2. Terragen seems to take a long time when switching between menus. If I swap from, say atmosphere to terrain I will always get the lovely Mac rainbow wheel before I can perform any edits.  Also seemingly at random Terragen behaves as though I have totally run out of ram. My stylus has a 5 sec delay as do all panel interactions/movements. I look in my activity monitor and everything looks fine and Nuke which was open at the same time performs as normal. 
When I restart Terragen all is back to normal.

I am running an Imac pro with 64gb ram so I have got a reasonable amount of oomph.

Thanks in advance.

James.

[Oshyan]

Your first issue is very strange, I have not seen that and can't replicate it here. If it is possible for you to share a screenshot or better yet a short video of the issue occurring that would be great. You can send it to support AT planetside.co.uk, or put it up privately on YouTube, perhaps.

The second issue makes me wonder if there is some negative interaction happening with another piece of software or hardware on your system. That kind of responsiveness issue is definitely not normal. You describe this issue as if it always happens to you, regardless of the scene. Is that the case? Does it occur even with the default scene you get when you start Terragen?

You mention your stylus and it seems like one of the few elements in your setup which may be less common. Would it be possible for you to try disabling/disconnecting your stylus to see if that has any effect?

The other thing that comes to mind is some kind of graphics system incompatibility. What version of OS X are you running and what specific model is your iMac? Can you try a test for us? When you have Terragen open and it is having this "Mac rainbow" wait icon behavior, try *closeing* the 3D preview with the X button upper-right of that part of the UI. Then try switching between layouts (e.g. Atmosphere to Terrain, as you mentioned) and see if there is the same delay.

- Oshyan

[WAS]

I am also running a second 4k monitor from a thunderbolt port on the Mac. Oh and a wacom.

Do you know what model Xeon they got in that thing? With dual 4k (?) and 3ghz intel xeon, I imagine there would be substantial bottlenecking. With TG wanting to use 100% of your CPU, this could potentially cause I/O wait issues. From my experience using other programs with TG, and other programs in general, they're not going to wait for other tasks, they want that CPU power "now".

[WAS]

Intel Xeon w.  10 core 3ghz.

Hmm that should be enough umph. In addition to Oshyan's suggestions, what's happens if you set TG to use 8 threads?

[WAS]

I will give it a go. Thanks for the suggestion. It seems it is only the heavier tabs that have the delay which is usually about 5 secs. So it always happens when I switch to terrain or atmos. Not with camera. I am gonna put a bit of time aside and have a play see what I come up with.
Rendering on the other hand seems pretty quick.
Cheers.
James.

To me that does sound like an I/O wait issue. Not sure if it's the GPU, but 4K dual monitors on 3ghz, regardless of cores sounds like a heavy demand of the CPU.

When it does load the new tab is it instant? No rendering of elements with blank stuff?

[raymoh]

You're not the only one! Here the same story. Terragen 4 (not only newest version) was and is sometimes very unresponsive, with the same issues you mentioned. I'm also working with an iMac Pro 8 cores with 64 GB RAM (3.2 GHz Xeon W, Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB, built in Retina Display 27" 5120x2880)

Time ago I opened a thread to this problem:

https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25971.msg257925.html#msg257925

Since then nothing has changed in the behavior of Terragen. I can work with, but sometimes it's  a "little" annoying.
If you working "busy" with Terragen (many commands in short time) normally it will crash and you have lost your work if not saved earlier!
Like no other application on my mac Terragen is demanding CPU-Power, RAM use seems to be about normal, some GB. The longer you work with Terragen the more it becomes unresponsive.

[WAS]

Do you get max frequency hits when you're doing things like changing tabs in Terragen's main GUI on your CPU (especially with preview paused)?

Do you have GPU Switching (GPU Acceleration) enabled? This is automatic on the computers best judgement and may be interfering with things.

[raymoh]

That's the point! The more and faster I make changes, the faster the "beachball" appears and slows down the whole system.
To my knowledge there is no way on a Mac to influence the GPU. I guess the GPU acceleration is always active.

[james adamson]

Hi.
(I renamed the thread as I made the mistake of lumping two very different issues into one.)
I will take a closer look at the low level cloud issue and report back.
 Apologies for the late response to this thread I after all started. So in response to closing the 3d preview window as you suggested Oshyan, I tried that and it made no difference.
Although with some tabs the preview would automatically reopen, but still just directly double clicking nodes in node graph would initiate the rainbow wheel on most occasions. The five second delay when interacting with the UI seems not to happen when using the mouse instead of the tablet. (Mostly.) Just last night I had the same problem with the mouse but saying that I had a lot going on across my system at that point. So I am still in the dark with this interactivity issue. 
Again I can jump straight across to Nuke whilst I am experiencing this in Terragen and there are none of these issues.
Also I have not used a mouse for any VFX work for about 17 years so I really would rather not start now. If there are any ideas why the Wacom would be behaving like this only with Terragen I would very much appreciate any suggestions.
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks in advance.
James.

[Oshyan]

I wonder if the way that the Wacom driver polls or otherwise interacts with the UI for Terragen is causing excessive updates to the cursor position and slowing things down. I honestly don't know. I wonder if Matt has a tablet to test. I know he has a touch-sensitive laptop but that's not really a fair test, I think.

- Oshyan

[WAS]

I wonder if the way that the Wacom driver polls or otherwise interacts with the UI for Terragen is causing excessive updates to the cursor position and slowing things down. I honestly don't know. I wonder if Matt has a tablet to test. I know he has a touch-sensitive laptop but that's not really a fair test, I think.

- Oshyan

I have a WACOM on my Windows system, never an issue. I've even been using it lately cause I can't lean forward to work at the PC well right now.

I'm not sure how this would cause an issue though if he's not using it, the pen should go idle. Unless it's vibrating on the tablet.

[Oshyan]

I have a WACOM on my Windows system, never an issue. I've even been using it lately cause I can't lean forward to work at the PC well right now.

That's good to know, but I'm pretty sure he's on a Mac, which of course can totally change things.


- Oshyan

[WAS]

I have a WACOM on my Windows system, never an issue. I've even been using it lately cause I can't lean forward to work at the PC well right now.

That's good to know, but I'm pretty sure he's on a Mac, which of course can totally change things.


- Oshyan

Yeah though like my edit the pen should also go idle and not update as to save battery. But the pen could be being bumped, or vibrating preventing idle power saving.

[Oshyan]

Unless I misunderstood, he uses the pen all the time for pointer interactions. So any time he'd be doing anything at all he'd be holding the pen, which involves micro-movements that will probably change the cursor position even if only subtly. 

Also I don't know if your pen+tablet or his have one, but my old one (Wacom) didn't have a battery that I'm aware of. If it did, it lasted for like 10 years.  

- Oshyan

[WAS]

Unless I misunderstood, he uses the pen all the time for pointer interactions. So any time he'd be doing anything at all he'd be holding the pen, which involves micro-movements that will probably change the cursor position even if only subtly.

Also I don't know if your pen+tablet or his have one, but my old one (Wacom) didn't have a battery that I'm aware of. If it did, it lasted for like 10 years.

- Oshyan

Hmm. That could be, but as far as I know a WACOM pen is scaled to your monitor(s) and is slower than your mouse because the tablet references the monitor aspect ratio. So movements are much slower than conventional mouse movements. So there should actually be less updates than with an optical mouse, where a bump, or slight movement can be across the entire screen(s) (plus 4 ohters you don't have if they were there).

And yeah, older WACOMs were magnetic. My current Intuos has a battery, and charges wirelessly off the tablet.

I can litteraly bump my mouse, and because of velocity, will fly in a split second. The tablets, you'd have to actually draw across one end to the next.