Planetside Software Forums

Support => Terragen Support => Topic started by: choronr on October 25, 2007, 02:12:52 AM

Title: Population Hiccups...
Post by: choronr on October 25, 2007, 02:12:52 AM
I've taken a proven .tgd which had two populations of vegetation and rendered successfully and now have added a third population to give the vegetation some variance in color and size. I start a test crop render; the render starts; but, nothing happens - no timer showing the time consumed in rendering shows up. The system is not locked up - only, nothing happens ...no rendering is occurring!

I am sorry to say that I think I am at the point where I should wait until the final version of TG2 is released before wasting any more time with it; or perhaps, until the next upgrade is available.

Bob
Title: Re: Population Hiccups...
Post by: bigben on October 25, 2007, 02:28:20 AM
How big are the populations?  What happens to memory usage when you start the render?
Title: Re: Population Hiccups...
Post by: Oshyan on October 25, 2007, 01:42:27 PM
Same questions as Bigben, and also what size (file size and number of polygons) are the models? How much memory does your system have, what OS, etc?

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population Hiccups...
Post by: choronr on October 25, 2007, 10:27:30 PM
Thank you Ben and Oshyan. I have since gotten to render the image without making any changes. For some reason, the other evening, the image would not start the render after I placed the third population of plants into the scene. I suspect some other function started behind the scenes which prevented TG2 from rendering. I'll post this image in the forum when it is complete ...sometime next week.

Thank you both for your thoughts.

Bob
Title: Re: Population Hiccups...
Post by: bigben on October 26, 2007, 01:14:23 AM
This may still point to a memory issue. You may be near the limit of memory usage so it will partly depend on what else you have/had running and possibly on what you hade done in TG2 prior to loading the third population.   When nearing this limit I have often found that I can do one render at the start of a session, but the second attempt after changing some settings won't finish... you may also get TG reporting image load failed errors andother miscellaneous problems, so it always pays to check the RAM and VM usage in these situations. If the combined RAM/VM gets near 2.1Gb you're heading towards trouble (in my experience).
Title: Re: Population Hiccups...
Post by: choronr on October 26, 2007, 01:37:19 AM
Thanks Ben for your information. I recently fired up my new system which I built during May and early June this year. Basically, I have 4GB of DDR2 Ram; an Intel Quad Core Extreme processor; two, Western Digital Raptor 10,000 rpm hard drives (RAID mirrored); two BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC2/768 MB GDDR3/SLI ready/PCI express/Dual DVI/HD TV/video cards (SLI); A BFG 1,000 watt power supply; and, the operating system is Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit. I would have installed the 64 bit; but, I think I would have had problems with some of my programs. The motherboard is the EVGA nForce  680i SLI NVIDIA Socket 775 ATX Motherboard A1 version/Audio/PCI express/SLI/Dual Gigabyte LAN/S/PDIF/USB and Firewire/Serial ATA/RAID.

Since I've used this system for TG2, I have not had a single crash.

Bob
Title: Re: Population Hiccups...
Post by: cyphyr on October 26, 2007, 06:44:35 AM
Well you've answered your own question and I do agree with Bens observations. It dose seem that TG has some issues with clearing out its memory. I also, for complex scenes, find that it will render fine on the first attempt but crash on subsequent renders until I restart TG. To be on the safe side I usually reboot. On a similar note I have also noticed that if I change an image map (population mask or texture) merely reloading it will not work, I have to load another image and then load my altered image. It would seem that TG is loading all images into memory and untill it gets an image of a different name they stay there even if they have changed. I would assume this is being addressed along with the other memory management issues. Storming system you have there by the way, should really rock once multi-threading is enabled.
Richard
Title: Re: Population Hiccups...
Post by: bigben on October 26, 2007, 09:31:10 PM
If it's going to render (including the preview) then it's going to need access to the data. While it may retain the images and terrain in memory, some (or even a lot) of it is shipped to VM. My NZ image contains some 400Mb of TERs and images but TG only uses 250Mb of RAM when it loads. The problems I've had only begin to creep in when the total memory usage approaches Windows' limit and usually starts with a failure to load a large image or terrain. I don't know that it's entirely a TG issue, but no doubt it will improve as they work on the renderer.

For the purposes of rendering animations I haven't had any problems running frame by frame renders using the CLI for projects that were close to the memory limits, so it appears to be freeing up memory nicely after it closes.