What's this bucket?

[reck]

I got an error message today that i've never seen before, somthing about Inibucket. It happend after I loaded an object into a population and then hit render. I thought it might be a problem with the object so I started a new tg2 and loaded the object and it worked fine, it just seems to be a problem when I load it into my current project.

So what can I do to fix it?

Thanks

[Matt]

Buckets are the individual tiles that TG renders to build the whole image. In this case the initialisation of one or more buckets failed because it couldn't find enough free memory on your system to allocate a large enough image buffer for that bucket. If your scene is using a lot of memory, or other programs running on your system are using a lot of memory, then this is more likely to happen simply because they are using up memory which might otherwise be available to the renderer. Another factor which can affect this is how long your computer has been running without a restart, although the first two factors are usually the most important.

How much RAM do you have?

Matt

[reck]

I have 2GB ram running on Windows Vista. I've not turned off the computer for quite a few days because when ever i've not been using the computer i've left it rendering. I'll give it a restart to see if it fixes the problem.

If it's running out of ram can it not use virtual memory? I've got a large hard drive it can use 

[reck]

Well rebooting the machine sorted out the problem. I'll have to remember that tip.

Cheers Matt.

[Matt]

I have 2GB ram running on Windows Vista. I've not turned off the computer for quite a few days because when ever i've not been using the computer i've left it rendering. I'll give it a restart to see if it fixes the problem.

If it's running out of ram can it not use virtual memory? I've got a large hard drive it can use 

In theory, but there is still an upper limit (of about 3Gb on a 32bit Windows system), and there are other complications such as memory fragmentation over time which can make it more difficult for the OS to find the memory that an application asks of it. If applications are clever about how they allocate memory, these problems can often be minimised, but there's probably room for improvement in Terragen.

Matt

[Matt]

Correction to the above: I think there is a limit of about 2Gb per 32bit application, not 3Gb.

Matt

[nikita]

Isn't it still 3GB if you use the /3G-switch?

[Matt]

I believe that's correct, nikita. Do you have any links to instructions on how to do that? I won't officially recommend it because I believe it involves some low level changes and I don't know enough about it.

Matt

[nikita]

Stephen (the creator of world machine) wrote down the instructions here:
http://www.world-machine.com/large_address.html
It's easy and, in my opinion, relatively safe. 

[JimB]

Stephen (the creator of world machine) wrote down the instructions here:
http://www.world-machine.com/large_address.html
It's easy and, in my opinion, relatively safe. 

I gave it a whirl on a 'not-so-important' machine and can output 4k .ter's from World Machine at last (though 8k still doesn't work  ). Thanks for the heads up.