Planetside Software Forums

For some reason when I go to render a full scene of clouds with a "ocean" my computer locks up. I've never froze in TG besides it's UI freezing momentarily, aand I left resource manager open to freeze with PC and resources are normal . 95% CPU usage and 2.8gb memory. What might cause this? I am using modulated direct like and environment light but not sure. Never had TG freeze windows completely.

It can happen when u run down on memory.

Quote from: archonforest on June 05, 2018, 02:23:13 PM
It can happen when u run down on memory.

Had plenty to spare. The system locks up while still on, so I left task manager open to freeze the resources at the moment of crash so I can look at them in the morning, as that's what I thought was happening, running out of RAM. But than again, I have 15GB of swap, so that shouldn't happen even if RAM is full, it should just get a tad slower as it swaps to a dedicated USB 3.0 flash drive for virtual RAM. I'd use internal memory, but it only has 64gb which is taken by projects and programs.

I wonder if there was just too much ray tracing going on. I have the clouds masked by a distance shader so no clouds are close the camera, it's than merged with a SSS shape to give a path to the horizon for the Sun to poke through. The two freezes happened when it got to the center of the frame and rendered the sun and blank space between clouds and the ocean below.

Without the mask to the horizon, ocean, and turning down AA a bit, I can render no problem. But usually I can render clouds no problem with max 0.6 AA as long as they aren't multiple V3 intersecting, if they are render times jump 100 fold, but even than, they'll render all night without a crash, giving me a couple tiles finished by morning.

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So it seems possibly part of it is the SSS mask, allowing the sun to peak through. My previous render without the SSS mask renders in 20 minutes.... here i am 2+ hours later and it's still chugging along at AA 0.2. This without the ocean as well. Must be all the thin V3 going on slowing things down I guess.

Edit; Oh, no AA is 0.6 somehow. Not sure how that got back up. I must have ctrl + z accidentally after the previous render.

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Yeah careful with the Ctrl+Z, especially as there's no redo. As Ctrl+Z doesn't undo node movements, groupings and the like, I've accidentally undone things countless times. The Undo History saves the day a lot.

No redo indeed...

Indeed. Render times are still extremely high however with the mask, to the point the letting it render at 0.2 AA was just too long. I've also discovered using an erosion height map (DK Classic Edition) to scalar for altitude offset cripples TG. Takes over 5 minutes to do preview 10%, prepass in render doesn't even start after 10 minutes.

Clouds are slow. With more then one input they get even slower.
I try to avoid that mostly but playing around and getting interesting shapes is nice of course.
Wish they would render faster. Because of the slowness i haven't played with your scene much.
But i would try to find some shapes with lower cloud density and with higher sharpness.
If i hadn't a render running i would test if there was any difference in render time with that.
There would be a difference in the look probably.

Quote from: Kadri on June 06, 2018, 02:29:56 PM

Clouds are slow. With more then one input they get even slower.
I try to avoid that mostly but playing around and getting interesting shapes is nice of course.
Wish they would render faster. Because of the slowness i haven't played with your scene much.
But i would try to find some shapes with lower cloud density and with higher sharpness.
If i hadn't a render running i would test if there was any difference in render time with that.
There would be a difference in the look probably.

I've tried all sorts of densities and edge sharpness, this seems to be something else. It's only specific to DK classic erosion.

Addition, the other problem is specific to the mask, not the cloud densities. Without the SSS mask it renders fine. This may be because again the SSS shape is creating too much transition from density fractal to nothing, which of course has all sorts of transitioning scattering levels.

If the file you made available to download here then there is nothing wrong with that file of yours.
Renders fine here. And in a time I would expect from such a setup. Just over 1 hour (simply opened the scene file and hit the Render button).
CHeers, Klaus

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Quote from: KlausK on June 06, 2018, 08:01:35 PM
If the file you made available to download here then there is nothing wrong with that file of yours.
Renders fine here. And in a time I would expect from such a setup. Just over 1 hour (simply opened the scene file and hit the Render button).
CHeers, Klaus

That's good to know. Though I'd imagine your computer is much stronger to do that in an hour with reflections and all. I can render it in 20 minutes without the mask or water, with the mask, it spikes to over an hour, slowing down after hitting the sun area. This isn't a problem with the sun showing through clouds without a specific mask. It just takes playing with dozens and dozens of seeds and sun angles.

Doesn't look half bad either, by and by, thanks for showing me.

Rendered fine for me too.  Nice scene!

I rendered at 50% due to being warm today and I had other work to do -- 1.5 hours.  The max memory used was 6gb.

You can see the specs of my computer in the "Signature" line of my messages.
Before I built this computer I had a Dual Core Notebook - and gave up on TG for some time.
It was simply too slow to get anywhere. TG3 was hard to handle for the labtop and TG4 simply did not move at all - at least that was my impression. Sure, minimum specs to run the software are easily met most of the time. But is it fun? Well, it was not for me.
This machine is still not the beefiest in the world but trying things out, building and rendering stuff is all happening fast enough now for my taste.
I am a more or less happy customer now :) The investment did pay off for sure.
CHeers, Klaus

Quote from: KlausK on June 07, 2018, 04:42:04 AM
You can see the specs of my computer in the "Signature" line of my messages.
Before I built this computer I had a Dual Core Notebook - and gave up on TG for some time.
It was simply too slow to get anywhere. TG3 was hard to handle for the labtop and TG4 simply did not move at all - at least that was my impression. Sure, minimum specs to run the software are easily met most of the time. But is it fun? Well, it was not for me.
This machine is still not the beefiest in the world but trying things out, building and rendering stuff is all happening fast enough now for my taste.
I am a more or less happy customer now :) The investment did pay off for sure.
CHeers, Klaus

Oddly that's almost the exact spec of this machine I'm on now.  :o Except the graphics card.

@WASasquatch - the erosion filters can slow down loads if played around with in the way you are. Have you tried exporting eroded terrain as a heightfield, then reimporting it in the same place, turning off the erosion filter?

Works quite well, don`t you think? Graphics Card does not make a big difference for TG right now but, for other apps I`m using I`d really like to get one of the newer Nvidia 1080 models. But this thread isn`t about specs so I`ll shut up now. :-X
CHeers, Klaus

Quote from: ajcgi on June 07, 2018, 07:15:28 AM

Quote from: KlausK on June 07, 2018, 04:42:04 AM
You can see the specs of my computer in the "Signature" line of my messages.
Before I built this computer I had a Dual Core Notebook - and gave up on TG for some time.
It was simply too slow to get anywhere. TG3 was hard to handle for the labtop and TG4 simply did not move at all - at least that was my impression. Sure, minimum specs to run the software are easily met most of the time. But is it fun? Well, it was not for me.
This machine is still not the beefiest in the world but trying things out, building and rendering stuff is all happening fast enough now for my taste.
I am a more or less happy customer now :) The investment did pay off for sure.
CHeers, Klaus

Oddly that's almost the exact spec of this machine I'm on now.  :o Except the graphics card.

@WASasquatch - the erosion filters can slow down loads if played around with in the way you are. Have you tried exporting eroded terrain as a heightfield, then reimporting it in the same place, turning off the erosion filter?

I am not positive but I don't believe I can export heightmaps from free version? Though I have never tried. I've been using Daniil's internal file saving.

Though that PC won't be much of a problem anymore as I killed it last night. Dropped a heavy controller off my loft from about 3 feet right onto the PC dongle on the back of my monitor. Lol

RAM usage per-computer doesn't seem to be relevant the way TG handles memory.  Not really compareable, but does of course allow faster render times. TG seems to use built-im swap rather well. Though I have noticed if I do crash (rare) my USB drive will "consume" some data, and being dedicated to the system for vram, I can't access the files to remove so I have to format if it happens.

What matters with RAM and TG is objects I believe. That data can't. Be split between RAM and VRAM it has to be a whole if I remember correctly. Similar to assets in game engines.

Quote from: WASasquatch on June 07, 2018, 11:45:54 AM

I am not positive but I don't believe I can export heightmaps from free version? Though I have never tried. I've been using Daniil's internal file saving.

Though that PC won't be much of a problem anymore as I killed it last night. Dropped a heavy controller off my loft from about 3 feet right onto the PC dongle on the back of my monitor. Lol

RAM usage per-computer doesn't seem to be relevant the way TG handles memory.  Not really compareable, but does of course allow faster render times. TG seems to use built-im swap rather well. Though I have noticed if I do crash (rare) my USB drive will "consume" some data, and being dedicated to the system for vram, I can't access the files to remove so I have to format if it happens.

What matters with RAM and TG is objects I believe. That data can't. Be split between RAM and VRAM it has to be a whole if I remember correctly. Similar to assets in game engines.

Ah man... I cringed at the part about dropping that controller.

I think you're right about RAM. It's very rarely the issue for me either, which is super impressive.