Hi again.
So I am experiencing more frequent and drastic performance issues on my Mac. It seems the more complex the scene gets so do the performance issues.
My computer is being totally frozen at certain points whereby I can not interact with it until Terragen frees up whatever processes it has got hold of.
Activity monitor does not display anything outlandish and all I seem to be able to do is sit and wait. The lag with the stylus is more frequent and I have discovered that the mouse is affected it just behave differently to the pen. Where the pen will display the lag as a slow motion movement across the screen the mouse jumps from 1 position to the next.
The only thing I can think of and I am in no way a tech head is that the IMac Pro has AMD Radeon gfx which I think is not a normal mac setup? Just a thought.
And here we go. My computer and Terragen have been sitting there idly for at least half an hour. I just went to finder to open a file and the whole thing is slow.
I mean very slow. Everything is slow.
Any feedback greatly appreciated.
Ta.
James.
Can you post the .tgd of your project?
Does your scene contain a lot of objects/populations and if so, do you preview them as boundary boxes or wireframes?
What are your system specs anyway?
Hi.
I am just rendering a test frame, so system is tied up for a while.
I do have a population in the scene. A load of x frog trees but they are disabled and these issues were apparent before they were added to the scene. However when visible I had the preview set to wireframe I believe I will check.
I have an I mac Pro. AMD Radeon gfx 64 gb. Intel xeon w 3ghz 10 core. 20 hyperthreahds .(I think its twenty.) It must be because Terragen detects 20 cores.
The mac monitor is 5k and I also have a dell 4k monitor. I have turned this off and the problem still persists. I have disabled my Wacom and the problem still persists. I had something similar on another application and the tech support guy where I was working said it was a memory leak but I know nothing of such things so can not elaborate.
It really has gotten exponentially worse with every node I had to my scene. I will upload tgd file when test render completes. Rendering is not a problem that is
pretty quick its just interactivity.
Cheers.
James.
More of this weird behaviour.
I have paused the 3d preview. I only have Terragen running and it is idle yet my system says 36 gb of memory is being used.
Interaction with basic Mac functions is very slow. For instance moving a screenshot across my desktop.
Help!
Have you tried leaving a couple of threads free for the OS? So in TG preferences manually input 18.
I think Terragen does that automatically but I will take a look. Maybe I should free up some more. But what it looks like is happening is each time I render a frame it uses up memory and does not free it up afterwards. Again I am very untechnical so am making a wild guess here.
Thanks for the suggestion. Fingers crossed.
Reducing maximum threads in preferences is a good suggestion for keeping your system responsive.
The fact that TG is unresponsive might be a bit less related to that, but it's good to rule out that you are choking your OS.
How many nodes does your setup have?
I have a 24 core 48 thread machine (max threads = 44) and still with heavy scenes TG is slow, so I'm experiencing similar issues, but definitely to a lesser degree than you.
Looking forward to see your .tgd file for inspection.
Cheers.
I will upload scene in the next hour.
When I run heavy Modo scenes and I have an pretty huge one where the scene file is over a gig
I get no impact on the rest of my system. If I let Modo finish its calculations and let it sit there I can run Nuke or any other program with no problems. And that is with Modo using all 20 threads. I restarted Terragen because I could not do anything on my machine and I have opened up the same setup and it is working fine. Hardly any extra memory being used until I render a frame. Then it jumps from 17gb to 27 I am keeping an eye on the memory usage to see if there is a critical point at which things go south.
Cheers.
James.
here is my scene file
I took a quick look at your file, but RayTraced reflections on a very displaced terrain will certainly bring trouble (extremely long render time). I wonder why you have that reflection? Reflection on rocks? I'd decrease reflectivity and certainly disable RT!
I will try that. I am attempting to get some specular glints as sun hits snowy mountains and stones. These would bounce light when hit with a strong direct light source like the sun.
Thanks for the feedback.
James.
So you should add reflectivity to snow and stones separately, because each needs its own values. I think it's good to build the scene first and then the surfaces with basic colors to get an idea of the terrain with its environments. After that build up the surfaces, each with their own set of color and small displacement shaders (and finally some reflections)...
Hi Dune. Yeah I would normally isolate everything. I would in Modo or Nuke but I got impatient as I have not rendered a whole moving scene yet to look at. I was stupidly put off by the fact that the reflective shader has no mask input so just hit render and then realised the obvious that I guess you just use it through a surface layer?
Anyway I am interested in seeing a full scene rendered even with the obvious shading errors so I am leaving it to chug away and its only 1.5 mins a frame.
Is that how you would recommend building up the shading part of a project? Isolate each component with a surface layer?
Or are there other ways?
I am also mystified as to how you would go about doing math ops on masks in TG. For instance, say I wanted an edge matte of the cliff for which I already have a mask to add some moss or something how would I get an edge mask? Or to output a mask of a displacement fractal as an image. Are there any visual tools for producing masks?
Cheers.
James
Yes, I would add a few surface shaders under the base colors and hook masks in there (or use altitude or slope restraints) to see the basic layout in basic colors first. Then add all colors (incluing indeed reflective) as children of each surface layer.
Masks are sometimes easy, sometimes pretty hard to get, so you need to experiment with that. Good practise is to add a final surface layer at the end of the line with a test color and hook everything you want to see into mask input. You can use color adjusts to change masks, or use (blue nodes) add, multiply, mix, subtract, etc to combine masks. That can get pretty complicated, so name each node!
Can you save your populations pop to disk, remove it, and check for this memory issue again on idle? It sounds like you may have a way more severe version of the memory leak on windows.
When you close TG do you recover back all the memory it held on to? Exactly?
Graphic drivers could be a concern but it shouldn't be. I don't believe TG uses anything special between APIs (if anything? Aren't previews CPU?). Probably generic calls so if there was a issue I feel it would be effecting more than just TG.
Hi James,
I don't know what's causing this but we'll try to solve it. We should test the possibility that it's caused by the imported objects and populations in your scene. It could be - maybe - that disabling them is not having the same effect as fully deleting them.
Can you try the following?
1. The next time you see this slowdown, delete the populations (and any other imported object nodes). See if that changes anything for the better (e.g. RAM use, slowdown).
2. Save another version of your project after you deleted the populations and imported objects. Restart Terragen and load the version of the project where these things are deleted. If possible, continue working with this version for a while, and do some renders just like you have been so far (but without the objects). See if this changes anything for the better.
Hi.
The population was the last thing I added to scene and the slowdowns were happening way before I got there.
That said it was at its worst with the population in place. As far as I can tell the 3d preview has no bearing on the issue.
When it was at its most severe terragen was idle and I could not open files on the mac without a severe delay. Every action had a very long delay even just moving the cursor.
At that point I quit terragen and memory use went down from 36 gb to 14. I reopened the exact same scene and memory went up
but only to 17 gb. I rendered a frame and memory went up to 26 gb.
Now I have had the same scene rendering for over 4 hours 108 frames and the memory is stable at 20 gb.
Previously I was rendering a low res frame every few minutes to check progress and this seemed to make the problem exponentially worse. I could be wrong of course and that could be a red herring. Whats odd is when I run Modo and Nuke at the same time the memory usage has gone much higher with no impact on basic Mac functions. The apps get sluggish of course but my mac will still operate normally outside of those apps.
Hope this helps.
Thanks again. This forum is awesome.
Hi Matt I will try your suggestions though and see if that helps.
Ta.
James.
After working for a (long) time, especially on heavy scenes, it's good to shut down and restart, to flush memory.
Hi Dune. Thanks. That does seem to be working. I have also taken the advice of others and reduced the thread count available to Terragen and that may be also helping. It is strange that non of my other apps have had the same effect on my system.
Like I said I have had extremely large Modo scenes one scene file was a gig and yes modo would grind to a halt but when Idle with the scene live in Modo I could perform other tasks on my Mac.
But at any rate restarting Terragen works and it seems to take a while for it to get sluggish again. So onwards and upwards.
Thanks.
James.
Hi Matt. Sorry I have not tried your suggestion yet. I will take a look at it later today.
Trying to get something finished once done I will look at it and seem if that help.
Ta.
James.