Error Related to...?

[rcallicotte]

Has this error been addressed and fixed in the coming version?  It's not related to anything but weirdness.  One minute I'm doing test renders and the next minute (really hours later with the same setup) I get this error.

[Tangled-Universe]

I've had that in previous versions too but not in the latest one anymore...
Fascinating.

[rcallicotte]

Hope it's being dealt with.  I had one population, one loaded terrain of 4096X4096 and one image of about 2048X2048 used as a blend shader.  I was doing fine until it just wouldn't go.  Obviously, something changed, but I couldn't figure out what.  Eliminating this completely from our work flow so we don't need to know why this is happening would be a good step.   

[Cyber-Angel]

Could it be some kind of memory error for example used memory not been released or some thing along those lines? Try again and see if you get the same error, if you can try and replicate the error (Not Ideal I know) and see if the same thing happens.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel     

[Matt]

We've made some changes to the renderer and fixed some memory-related issues with the user interface, both of which should reduce the chances of this occurring in future. However, if your setup is using a lot of RAM or your sytem is low on memory then there is always the chance that this (or other memory allocation warnings) will popup in future. A good precaution is always to restart Terragen before doing a long or important render, especially if you have been working for more than a few hours or rendered many tests beforehand.

Matt

[rcallicotte]

Have a difficult time believing it's so strongly memory related.  Hopefully, the fix is something else.  Here is my task manager at the time of the error.

[Oshyan]

Even though you may have available *total system memory*, the amount that TG2 is actually using relative to wha the OS will allocate to it is key. If TG2 is what is making your pagefile over 1GB it may still me a memory issue.

- Oshyan

[rcallicotte]

Oshyan, I've continued some testing with this and the amount of ram above 500K, according to what I see in Task Manager.  I have 2G and on this machine there is a Dual Core.  So it's a pretty new machine; not cutting edge.  I still think it's related to something else at its core that's hiding behind some leak in memory or some such.  Wish I could be more help.

[Oshyan]

Turn on visibility of Virtual Memory in task manager *processes* column and see what TG is using.

- Oshyan

[rcallicotte]

Hey!!  You're not going to believe this.  I only have problems when doing a crop render.  Otherwise, no error.

[Oshyan]

Interesting! Note that the Virtual Memory column is still *not* shown in that image. You have to go to the View menu and choose Select Columns then turn it on and expand the window size. It would be useful to see if there is a difference in actual memory use between normal and cropped render.

- Oshyan

[rcallicotte]

Oshyan, that render is happening on another machine that I won't see until Monday.  If I can, I'll try to reproduce the same thing here and try both cropped and regular render with the Virtual Memory setting showing.  Haven't used that before.  I'll post my results.

[rcallicotte]

Oshyan,

The first picture is VM when running without a crop.  The VM and memory for TGD.EXE both go up and down.  The VM see-saws back and forth between 925K and 1.4M, until the render eventually just completely crashes TGD.  There are no error messages; just a complete wipeout.

The second picture was taken during the crop process.  RAM reached this amount and then gave the following error (the last picture).  This happened almost immediately and was not instantly after the population loaded, but it was only seconds later that the error came up.

[Oshyan]

Very interesting. The memory usage is actually much higher (apparently) when not cropping. That's not necessarily surprising from a rendering standpoint, but as far as the crash goes it's potentially puzzling. In any case I hope this investigation will help narrow down the problem. Is this a complex scene or would it be fairly easy to share a .tgd?

- Oshyan

[rcallicotte]

Messy, but not very complex.  I did just see that I didn't use the Compute Terrain.  Bypassing this might cause some problems, right?

I use one image that is about 2000X1800.  Nothing else.

With the work you're doing on that side, I can hope that this will be of some use.  If not, no loss.

If you have more questions about this, let me know.