4.6.3 Constant crashing to desktop

[yaschan]

Getting random but constant crashing to desktop.
Trying to render a simple scene with .fbx populated trees in it.
Anything higher than 2000 px wide will crash eventually.
Unable to render out anything.

[Dune]

Sounds strange. Can you post the tgd? And what do you mean by .fbx populated trees? Fbx objects can't be imported yet.

[Hannes]

Fbx objects can't be imported yet.

For a moment I thought "did I miss something?"

But yes, it's difficult to say something without checking thre file.

[yaschan]

Sending the .TGD with assets over via Google Drive link. here 

I am sorry, I meant .obj populated trees

One thing that I suspect would be that I have had the assets stored on network storage, but trying now with them moved to local.

Related question, is there a way to make relative paths to assets so that if I send scene over to a friend they don't need to mess with the file paths?

The crashing happens even with the populations deleted as well though. But now I suspect it got something to do with the file paths

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Yaschan,

One thing you can do when sending a Terragen project file and its contents to a friend is to use the "Export Gathered Project" feature under the File menu.  Provided, of course, that your paths are correct in your master Terragen project, the contents of the gathered project will be placed in a ProjectAssets folder at the location you specify.  Then you can send the entire gathered project to your friend and the paths will be correct.

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Yaschan,

When I loaded your project file, Terragen's Errors and Warnings window reported that it couldn't find the pine tree's texture map images.  This was expected because each of our computer systems have a different file structure.



I opened each of the tree object's internal node networks and repathed the texture maps to where they resided on my system, then rendered the following image at 3840 x 1500 pixels.  Since the populations were not reading from a saved cache file, Terragen automatically populated the terrain with the tree objects and rendered the frame.



Just for fun I viewed the MTL file associated with each OBJ file in a text editor.  None of the MTL files have texture maps assigned to the materials, so if you were to load one of these OBJ files into Terragen you would have to map the texture maps to the object anyways.  Once you do that, you can then save the object in the Terragen format, or TGO, by right clicking on the node in the Node Network pane and selecting Save Object File.

[yaschan]

Thanks, that is useful to know.

I wonder what would be the cause of the crashes though as I am unable to use the latest Terragen.

[Dune]

Maybe it's the amount of memory? With large populations it may get near or over the max memory available. So that would depend on your machine.
Btw. if you setup a file like this, there are some things I noticed that are worth considering;
1. It's more efficient to locate your pops in front of the camera for a still, and not at the same location. More than half the instances would be behind camera, taking memory.
2. If you use a fractal's color to drive displacement, it's better to reduce the color roughness from 5 to maybe 1, or you get a lot of small spikes. They take more render time, and will probably not even be seen in the kind of image you're making.
3. Also, with this kind of image, detail of 5 would be enough, and you can probably even get away with 4.
4. AA of 6 would be enough too, and perhaps even lower. Also depends on the specs of your machine, if it's not too fast, efficiency in this kind of settings is very important.
5. Easy clouds are relatively complex, and thus slow. For such high, small clouds, you could also get away with a simple v2 cloud layer and some clouds of medium size, say 400/2000/10.

[KlausK]

There is the also the "Clip to Camera" checkbox when working with populations.
That should be the most efficent way, I guess.

CHeers, Klaus