I tried rendering something recently, and it was looking good! About 23 hours - just over half way through ... I was in another app and boom the computer froze solid as a brick. I could not even get to the desktop to see what happened. :o
Much to my grief, I was left with no choice but to sadly slam the reset button and lose all my work. >:( I felt like I had lost a baby!!! :'(
I don't find myself wanting to repeat this again. I don't want to retry this render again and go through that again.
Is there a way to find out after the fact what happened so this don't simply repeat? I know some apps have an error log they write.
Is there ever going to be a way to save a render to a file and continue later on? As it stands I don't think I will be trying that render again. It is simply not the kind of experience I want to repeat and that means putting terragen 2 in the back burner till some update takes place.
The output from the commandline interface can be piped to a log file although this is only available with the purchased version. This can sometimes give a clue to a crash, particularly with things that cause a crash prior to rendering commencing. This is the command I use:
%TERRAGEN_PATH%tgdcli > %TERRAGEN_PATH%core1_log.txt
I have two of these to run 2 copies of TG2 on a dual core system with separate logs.
Other than that the answer is usually no. Once a render is finished (or stopped) the image is automatically saved to a temporary folder which can be a big help. This has just saved me one render where I didn't have enough GDI resources left to actually save the finished render. Other than that, if you find a particular project has crashed part way through it's often due to running out of RAM. You can watch the progress of the memory usage using the Task Manager although this is a very manual process. Make sure you include virtual memory as well, as it's the combined total of RAM and virtual memory that will be the killer.
Running other apps can contribute to problems. Other than that.. maybe finetuning your zen so that you don't care so much when things go wrong ;) It is a prerelease, so you have to expect some problems but there is still a lot that you can do.
Quote from: bigben on March 06, 2008, 03:21:49 PM
Once a render is finished (or stopped) the image is automatically saved to a temporary folder...
What temporary folder. I had windows update reboot my computer last night. I think my render might have finished before the reboot. It was going on 90+ hours, so I pray that it finished before the reboot.
There appears to be some confusion between saving a render so I can load up the file and continue rendering it later, and saving an image or picture that is basically unfinished.
I refer to saving a render process so it can be continued, rather than having to completely start over.
If your computer fully locked up, this is unlikely to be a purely TG2 problem, although clearly TG2 contributed to its manifestation. This sounds like a hardware reliability issue, perhaps an overheating processor or slightly error-prone memory. TG2 will almost always only crash when it runs out of memory. Its own process will shut down, but the OS and other processes should be fine. If you experience hard freezes while using TG I would get an app to monitor the temperature of your CPU and make sure it is ok, and also make sure all drivers are updated.
- Oshyan
No, no confusion.. that's not possible at this point in time. One of the aspects of using pre-release software is that it helps if you can find why it crashed and avoid those situations for now so you don't get so frustrated. Or try posting the TGD here so people can help you find where the problem might be. This is a very helpful forum but people can't help troubleshoot without specific information.