Populations

Started by DanD, January 30, 2008, 06:13:04 AM

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DanD

   How many populations are most of you including in your renders ?
  I cant get over 3-4 before Tg2 crashes to the desktop. It doesnt seem to be
connected to the size of the model.

Will

I think for the free version they are limited to three, that could be the problem. Could you be more specific by how it crashes? (errors ,ect)
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

DanD

Yeah...I know about the free limitation,I have the Deep version.
  there isnt any error warning, I place the population..and TG2 crashes
about 70% of the time,A small box pops up saying  Terragen has encountered a problem

For those who do use large populations of trees etc. whats the average size of the
model and the population ?..usually my tree models are largish, between 45-120 megs
and the population is between 1- 12000

rcallicotte

DanD, I have the same experience.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

bigben

Most likely to be memory issues

  • Open the task manager, and add virtual memory size to the columns viewed
  • Start Terragen with %TERRAGEN_PATH%\tgdcli > tglog.txt
  • Open your TGD
  • Start your render and watch the memory usage

I experience crashes when the total memory usage gets to around 2.1Gb (exactly where depends on what else is running)
After the crash... open tglog.txt and scroll down and have a look at how may triangles the populator has generated.  Given the size of your models, I dare say the number will be pretty big....

There are of course other factors to memory usage, but when you're talking about populations, you need to plan to reserve a fair slab of memory for the objects.

You might also consider using billboard versions of your trees beyond a certain distance from the camera. You can easily combine the two using identical population settings for both and incorporating a distance shader into your population density shader to separate the two. This will help reduce the memory usage.

Oshyan

Except for foreground trees, 25MB models, let alone 125MB, are really too complex and detailed. I understand that may simply be what the objects you have access to are composed of, but if you have any ability to effectively reduce polys for populations I highly recommend doing so.

- Oshyan