I was working on a new scene today, sitting back watching a quality render to see how the terrain and shaders looked, and had a thought. What if it was possible to add object(s), like vegetation populations that are by default, disabled (while a render is in progress.) Would that work -- would the render not crash or be effected by adding disabled objects?
That would help a lot to pass the time during test/prep. renders.
You can try this, assuming that TG don't crash, that gonna depend of how is working your hardware in THAT moment. If you are rendering a single image, you dont gonna see any change in the render view, and dont gonna be afected, because the engine take previously the information of the camera, and start automatically to express that like pixels. that is what you mean?
I guess what I'm asking, because I don't know, if I added a tree population that entered into the tgd as disabled while a render was in progress, would it effect/crash Terragen? As far as I know, there's no way to do this other than editing the tgd file via a text editor. But that would require a lot of work in forming the complete population entry in the text file, which would be a lot of work (though I know I could do it -- I spent a lot of time learning to parse the tgd file format.) However, I don't know how Terragen (the application) would respond to an update to the tgd file while a render is in progress. I think Matt might have to answer this.
Also, I have crashed Terragen by making changes (inadvertently) while a render is in progress.
I don't think it is a good idea.
Yes it would definitely be helpful to be able to carry on working whilst a render is progressing.
Best bet would be to open up a second instance of Terragen on another computer, or I resources allow on the same PC. If on the same PC you can always limit the threads allocated to Terragen in the render tab and split them between each instance. So on a 6 core/12 thread system you set the max threads to 6.