Avoiding Painted Shader Crash

Started by leafspring, April 19, 2010, 03:54:27 PM

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leafspring

I guess it's a known bug, although I couldn't find anything on the forum in a quick search. Whenever I (accidentally) paint onto the sky instead of the terrain (or a plane) TG 2 crashes. Is there a way to avoid that? Because I don't want to adjust the camera everytime I get near the sky while painting.
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Oshyan

This is a known bug. Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to avoid it besides simply not painting on the sky. It's definitely something we will address in a future update.

- Oshyan

AlexK

#2
I found this post while searching for paint shader related crashes. Has there been any effort to fix this bug? I am evaluating Terragen 2 for a project and painting clouds (as described here http://www.mrlamppost.com/tg2/guides/paintsky.htm) is crucial to me. Is there a way to "not paint on the sky"? Like making an even bigger plane and putting it above the plane I am painting on or something.

dandelO

Go well above the cloudline and rotate the camera's X to -90. Now, you'll only be painting on the ground with the sky well out of reach of the brush(behind you ;)).

dandelO

#4
... Interesting, the painting sky bug, which, by the sound of staff replies to these topics on it, sounds like a small easy fix and it's probably already in the bag but, I can't seem to make the painted shader crash when using the 'view-relative' brush dimension. I'm scrawling all over entire view windows, sky and ground, both in the same stroke, etc.
Where a crash would happen in the 'absolute size' setting very abruptly, there is none at all, for me at least, using the other option. I can't make it crash.

AlexK

#5
Terragen only crashes for me when I am trying to actually render. Preview and painting works fine. I never tried to use the relative brush though. Might be worth a try. Also I can get it to work when using a HUGE plane above, so there is no possible way to paint in the sky. Also (related to the other thread) when I paint very sparsely, like only 10 or so strokes, everything works fine, but as soon as I try to "sculpt" my paintings and use more strokes Terragen crashes on render as well.

Luckily I found a very easy way around it (for now). I just use an image map and project a black and white image. That also seems to render quite a bit faster, so that's how I am going to do it until I hit another roadblock. (Which I hopefully won't.  ;) )

Henry Blewer

So far image maps work better than the paint shader. I have a feeling that this is one of the fixes in the next update. It also may be one of the more difficult things to fix.
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Oshyan

It *is* one of the more difficult fixes, and an overall fix these issues will not be in the next update unfortunately. Note that a crash while rendering is different than the crashes we're looking into with the painted shader, which occur during painting or saving of the file.

In any case I'm glad you found a workaround. Image maps are a good complement to or substitute for the Painted Shader, especially where more complex or precise control is needed.

- Oshyan

AlexK

Hi Oshyan,

if you need any help, logs, etc. to track this down please let me know. I am using the free version at the moment. (By the way, I purchased 2 days ago and should receive my full version any moment. Not sure if this makes a difference in performance or build number.)

Oshyan

Thanks Alex. We may take you up on that if you have consistent methods to reproduce it.

- Oshyan

AlexK

Well, I have only one scene so far and it consistently crashes while rendering when I overdo it with my paint strokes. But only during rendering. Preview works fine and painting and working works fine.

Oshyan

The rendering issue may he something we haven't seen yet. Can you send the TGD to support AT planetside.co.uk or post it here?

- Oshyan

AlexK

I'll try and make two version for you. One that works at the moment (and needs a few more paint strokes to crash) and one that already has a saved state that crashes on rendering. Not sure if I'll get to it today though.