crash on opening multishader: advice?

Started by Dune, March 30, 2009, 09:47:02 AM

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Dune

Is anyone familiar with the problem (and solving!) of the following? I added a number of individual tgo's of a simple farmhouse (multishader + 2 default shaders, with colour function = powerfractal shader) by copy/paste in the node network, and changed their XYZ values to form a village. But after about 30 houses, upon trying to open any multishader, TG crashes. Is there a limit to the number of individual tgo's? Is it getting too complicated? I noticed all the _1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1 's in the tgd and started to change this in shorter numbers corresponding to the number of the house (saved as a tgd_copy), but that didn't help.

I have include the original tgd if anyone wants to read the input. It probably won't work as a tgd without the basic files. I have also included a screendump of the crash.

Anyone?

Dune

domdib

I guess the obvious question is, why are you doing this via individual tgo's rather than a population? If you are concerned about placement, then fairly good results can be obtained using the painted shader as your blending shader. Or are you trying to recreate a village layout exactly? In which case, individual placement would be the way to go, and Planetside will hopefully have an answer for you.

Dune

Exactly, I want to place each individual farm on a specific place, a specific size and angle, so a population is out of the question. I got quite far without having to open the multishader, I just continued copypasting farms, and only changed their placement. Which worked so far on 50 farms. I dare not try to open the multishader, but perhaps there's no need after all. I can fix some colours in afterwork.
But the question remains; why?

Dune

Mohawk20

Dune, what kind of system do you have? Could it be that you reached the memory usage limit, because the farm object is big on polys?

Oh, and nice to see another Dutch face (without really seeing your face of course  ;)). Tangled Universe, Schmeerlap en ik zijn ook van onder de zeespiegel.  :P
Howgh!

Oshyan

Without seeing the scene myself yet I would guess that Mohawk is right and it may be memory related. With 50+ house models all rendered separately, you may run into memory limitations. Whereas with a population it would use instancing for the additional models, saving a lot of memory. Of course if each house model is different or the precise placement is important, then populations won't work.

Can you check your Task Manager with this scene open in TG2? Make sure to look at not just memory use, but also Virtual Memory, if possible. If it is getting close to 2GB and you're on a 32 bit operating system then it would be problematic, especially if you don't have 4+GB of memory.

- Oshyan

Dune

Hi Mohawk and Oshyan,

I will look into the memory thing, but I'm fairly confident that's not the problem. I have one of the newest machines, 4GB of memory, the /3GB switch is on, and above all, it renders fine. Only opening the multishader in the nodes freezes the lot, even after restarting and freshly loading the tgd. I can always acces through a text editor and change some values of course. I will get back to you.

En, pardon my Dutch, ik zit gelukkig niet onder de zeespiegel, maar er 7 meter boven ;-)

Dune

Oshyan

Hmm, in that case then I would guess bad textures or issues in the object file. Have you tried running the object through Poseray?

- Oshyan

Tangled-Universe

Quote from: Mohawk20 on March 30, 2009, 03:51:35 PM
Oh, and nice to see another Dutch face (without really seeing your face of course  ;)). Tangled Universe, Schmeerlap en ik zijn ook van onder de zeespiegel.  :P

Yeah great! Dutch are growing stronger here :p
Wist niet dat Schmeerlap ook een NL-er was btw :)

Martin

Dune

De naam Schmeerlap heeft toch wel iets Nederlands. Sorry, back to English; I still have the same problem opening any multishader, but the rendering is ok, at least at 1600 px wide. Virtual Memory use is only 1.5GB, so I am pretty confident it will work at 4500 px wide, which I need for the final work.
I might have changed a shader's name within the multishader, by mistake, in which case (I later found out with another project) it cannot find the default shader. Perhaps in this case, TG just crashes when unable to read. If it won't interfere with the render, I can live with this problem, although I remain curious why it happens. After finishing the project I might get rid of some farms in a copy tgd to see what happens.

I have made these objects in XFrog (a cube and some planes; they are small in the image, so I kept them very simple), changed the OBJ's to TGO's in TG, and individually these TGO's work perfectly.

Anyway, I have included a picture for the curious. It's the Dutch town of Zutphen around 1000 AD. Needs some afterwork in PS, because not all can be done in TG. This is all TG except for the smoke over the city.

Dune

RArcher

That is really very good.  I like the way you incorporated the image maps for the farmland.  Were the rivers done with the painted shader or is this from a proper DEM of the area?

cyphyr

www.richardfraservfx.com
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

Dune

Thanks for the compliment. It was all done using image maps (the very distant trees with a repeating, but small, image mask within certain boundaries). I painted the terrain in PS in greys, including the water. It takes some trial and error to get it right, but I'm getting used to think black-and-white by now. There are no DEM's of medieval area's I'm afraid. The rampart had to be more accurate, so I made a large image map of a small area and placed it at the right spot, with a certain displacement implemented.

Oshyan

Well I'm afraid I'm really at a loss here then. If it works fine in smaller numbers, it seems like it must be some sort of resource issue, although possibly a TG2 issue rather than a system resource issue. If you want to send in the TGD with all the supporting files we can take a look at it.

Nice scene in any case. :)

- Oshyan

Dune

I'm afraid all the supporting files will take quite some bytes (90+MB) to send, so I'll try to figure it out myself first. I have opened some homemade TGO's in Editpad, and noticed that some had 5-40 lines of TerragenGeometryData (©A%’@?Á‹ÙÀ-—A%’@?ÉŽæÀ-—A±O: Á¥fS¿­iPARáÁ¥fS....) at the end, but my farmhouse didn't. Strange, huh. I will update this through my XFR and OBJfile, and make a new (but same) farmhouse.tgo. See what happens there. And perhaps dump most of the later 25 farmhouses in a copy to see if I miswrote something there. Lucklily it's not a huge issue, since it works.

Dune