Equirectangular skybox rendering

Started by djd711, January 28, 2015, 11:24:40 AM

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djd711

I have recently built a new system and have been trying some renders with terragen 3. The renders are 10k by 5k spherical to be turned into cube maps for games. I set one rendering before work and when I got back the computer had restarted with an error message but the message told me very little. Could the system of run out of memory? My machine is a water-cooled  i7 4790 k, 16gb ram and a gtx970. The ram is the only thing I can think of.

Any help would be great!

Kadri


Sometimes posts like yours do show up. Look for some standard questions and answers here for example:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18067.msg175113.html#msg175113

Your problem could be different of course.


djd711

I have been rendering individual cube maps to try and avoid running out of memory however when trying to line them back up using Pano2vr there are visible seams where the lighting is different between faces. I made sure each camera was set to identical settings but still had the problem.

This leads me to ask is there any way to limit the amount of memory TG3 can use. I have done some reading on the subdiv cache but I can't get my head around it. When I start rendering an image the RAM usage by TG3 jumps straight to 9.5GB and then gradually climbs. I have a maximum of 16GB which is why I presume the computer had restarted on the last render attempt.

So I either need to find out why the lighting is different between the up down left right cube faces or limit the memory usage.

Kadri


Your lighting problem is probably related to GI cache.  Have a look here.

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15138.msg147392.html#msg147392

If you have not very big textures and-or big object files etc. i doubt that the quantity of your ram is a problem but i can't say for sure.

Have you tried some other tests that stresses you machine for any problems like memory for example?
Is your computer overclocked?
Have you looked at the thread i posted?

The subdiv cache isn't a problem too probably and Planetside says  the best is to leave it at default if possible. 100 mb for each CPU core is enough mostly.


djd711

I am literally just making some clouds with no terrains or objects.

Will TG3 continue to use RAM until there is no more therefore crashing or will it limit itself?

Kadri

Quote from: djd711 on January 29, 2015, 06:07:03 PM
I am literally just making some clouds with no terrains or objects.

Will TG3 continue to use RAM until there is no more therefore crashing or will it limit itself?

I haven't heart anything like that with only clouds. Interesting.
Oshyan or Matt will probably post here .

Oshyan

There is no way to limit TG's memory use, but your usage sounds quite high for what you're doing. Also, it shouldn't take down *your computer*, normally just TG would crash. I'm guessing you have some fairly high settings going on for your clouds/quality/detail/GI. There may also be a memory issue of some kind (hardware/stability), so I'd strongly suggest running Memtest86+ *overnight* and see if anything shows up. I actually had some memory issues on my liquid cooled machine some time back, so it definitely happens.

Ultimately though, if you're able to get renders done without using spherical and your only problem is edge blending, then GI caching might just solve your problem. There are official docs on it here: http://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Terragen_3_Global_Illumination#Rendering_with_GI
Generate a cache with Spherical (1 cache) and use that for each cube face, if popular. Alternatively, generate a cache *for each face*, then use "Equal blend within range" (they have to be named numerically/consecutively).

- Oshyan

Kadri

#7

Oshyan what do you think about a sticky thread related to crashes of Terragen and computers?
It is mostly all the time the same questions and things to be considered etc. you have to ask the poster.

Oshyan

I think maybe a general FAQ sticky post that links to the Wiki would be better. Maybe the text of it could have just a few words describing common problems, so it would show up in search results, but it should link to the Wiki for answers because that's really the best place for all documentation. This is something we've been thinking about doing lately anyway.

- Oshyan


djd711

Hey guys, sorry to have to bump an old thread but I have recently tried a large scale render and managed to reproduce the problem only this time I was at the machine. I was rendering a 15,000 x 7500 pixel spherical image with a power fractal terrain and a high level cirrus (2d) cloud layer. The atmosphere quality was increased from the default sample rate to about 40 odd.

The render went along as normal, took about 4 hours. Once Terragen had finished processing all the "buckets" it said not responding but I didn't worry because it usually does this to me before allowing me to save...just hangs for a few minutes. Only this time gave me BSOD and restarted thus losing the render. The error code BSOD gave me was "SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION"

I know we did find a way around this by rendering out individual sides but it's not a as convenient.

Oshyan

As before, I think you need to eliminate hardware issues as a source of the problem before we can really figure out anything more. If you do a web search on that error, you get information like "This error has been linked to excessive paged pool usage and may occur due to user-mode graphics drivers crossing over and passing bad data to the kernel code." and lots of references to either hardware/driver issues, or software that runs drivers and other low-level system hooks (like Daemon Tools) which Terragen doesn't do.

There is also this article that claims it may be caused by a Windows Update, although I don't know if you're running Windows 8 (would be good to know):
http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-1653284/fix-system-service-exception-bsod-error-windows.html

Other related info:
http://www.solvusoft.com/en/errors/blue-screen-errors/microsoft-corporation/windows-operating-system/bug-check-0x3b-system-service-exception/

Even if it is memory-related, as I mentioned previously if TG runs out of memory it just crashes; it should not take down your entire system. Windows in general tries to protect itself from any random application causing system-level faults. Only system-level drivers and services should - in general - be able to perform operations that cause such significant errors.

So it seems that most of the info on this error seems to point to a hardware or driver issue. I would suggest running Memtest86+ for a few hours to check your memory (Windows Memory Diagnostic has not been as reliable for me). Also check to make sure all your drivers are up-to-date, especially your graphics driver. And check for that Windows Update mentioned in the article above if you're running Win 8 (just in case).

I hope that helps. If you are able to test your hardware and no problems are found, we can continue trying to diagnose it further, but unless we can duplicate the error on our side it will be difficult to get any more information.

- Oshyan