Error at 87 hours, render not completed

Started by rageracer, February 06, 2011, 12:08:11 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

rageracer

I'm so friggin pee'd off  >:(  After 87 hours of rendering I get this,



Its not my best work but I thought I'd let it finish. I had the detail up on 1.

Is it a bug??

I'm not keen to do any more renders encase it happens again.

Version: 2.2.23.1

Dune

I can imagine it pisses you off, but it can easily be helped. This kind of render shouldn't take longer than 1-2 hours, without any failures. Check your settings, they shouldn't be that high, or post your TGD, so we can have a look.

jo

Hi,

It's isn't a bug. You've probably run out of memory unfortunately. TG2 is catching the problem before it causes a crash.

If you aren't already using it then you might want to look into turning on the "/3GB" switch in Windows. This will allow TG2 to use more memory. If you do a search you should turn up more information about it.

Although TG2 has a reputation for being slow if it's taking that long to render with what looks like a pretty simple scene then you almost certainly need to take a look at your render settings. TG2 gives you a lot of control but the flipside of that is that it also quite easily lets you get into situations where a scene can take forever to render. Check out these two threads for some information about appropriate render settings:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11665.0
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6442.0

There is more information but you'll need to search for it I'm afraid. As a starting point a detail level of 1 is a bit too high, 0.8 can give good results.

As Dune mentioned, if you post your TGD file people will able to give you advice on how you can speed things up.

Regards,

Jo

rageracer

Think Your right about the RAM. Only got 1.5GB  :(  (really need an upgrade)

I'll play around with the render settings as suggested and see if I can find one that works OK without compromising the quality to much.

When you say post your TGD, do you mean copy n paste the contents into a post or attach it as an attachment ?

Tangled-Universe

Quote from: rageracer on February 06, 2011, 06:32:18 AM
Think Your right about the RAM. Only got 1.5GB  :(  (really need an upgrade)

I'll play around with the render settings as suggested and see if I can find one that works OK without compromising the quality to much.

When you say post your TGD, do you mean copy n paste the contents into a post or attach it as an attachment ?


When you reply to a message you'll see "Attach" expressed in bold.
There you can choose a file and select the actual .tgd project file.
When you post the message the file will be included automatically.

I'm interested to see what you did here.

Cheers,
Martin

rageracer

I think this is the correct one. I have it setup with incremental saves.

I'll be upgrading to another PC this year thankfully. The one I'm on is a temp one. My beast of a PC died last year when the power supply failed. It fried every drive, CPU, motherboard and PCI cards. Only thing that survived was the AGP graphics card. That's in another PC now as I don't trust it.

Current PC,

CPU: AMD Sempron 1.6GHz 64bit
RAM: 1.5GB
Graphics Card: MSI N210 MD512H
OS: Windows 7 32bit

Dune

I had a little play with it. You used the alpine fractal at the wrong place, and your displacements were really extreme. That was the main culprit. Check this out, should render a lot faster. But the alpine fractal is a slow one anyway, keep that in mind.

Tangled-Universe

Yes, other than that I couldn't find any obvious reasons why it should have taken so long.
Looking at your specs it all seems quite logical. It's a single-core, isn't it?

Marlin

Quote from: jo on February 06, 2011, 04:04:55 AM
you might want to look into turning on the "/3GB" switch in Windows. This will allow TG2 to use more memory. If you do a search you should turn up more information about it.


Ok! so maybe I'm dumb  ??? How do you find and use the /3GB switch? Using Win 7 (64) with a 1tb hard drive.

RArcher

Marlin:  You don't.  the /3GB switch is applicable to 32 bit windows OS.  If you are already using the 64 bit version of windows then TG will already be using as much ram as you have up to around 3.7GB.

rageracer

Quote from: Dune on February 07, 2011, 04:53:58 AM
I had a little play with it. You used the alpine fractal at the wrong place, and your displacements were really extreme. That was the main culprit. Check this out, should render a lot faster. But the alpine fractal is a slow one anyway, keep that in mind.

Wow...Can't believe how long it's been since I had this issue. I have not had a lot of time to play with Terragen but thought I'd revisit this problem. Currently rendering the file you fixed up, big thanks by the way  :)
It's rendering away quite happily and is not slowing my system down.

Dune


Jonathan

I have 8 Gb Ram, and as we all now, the more populations you have (grass being one of the things that takes up memory!) the more memory you use. I tend to open Resource Monitor in windows, click on the memory tab and check on how much memory TGD is using - I had one model that took me up to 7Gb before it crashed. I simply reduced the area of the populations or increased the spacing to end up with a sensible sized model.....
Every problem is an opportunity, but there are so many opportunities it is a problem!

dandelO

A good idea, if using multiple populations of the same object, is to visit the internal network of your first population, cut(ctrl+x) the object node and then paste it to your main network view(this is not necessary but it makes your network more easy to understand than leaving the first object inside). Now, select this single object as the 'object maker' of each population which will use it. The population node has controls that can manipulate this object according to what's required of the pop' it's plugged into.
This saves lots of memory, especially if using large filesize objects with lots of large texture maps, say. The object only needs loaded once and you still have all your populations.
Instead of creating new populations that will contain another object, just duplicate(ctrl+D) the empty pop' node and assign the 'object maker', 'planet', 'terrain shader' and edit its settings to where the new population will be, scales, size etc.