Terragen Crashes with Water Shader

[Heeshung]

Almost always when I use a water shader in a render it will crash.  I've done searches, but I can't seem to find the exact problem I'm having.  The only way I can get one of these to fully render is to really dial down the detail, usually below 0.3.  I'm wondering whether it's a known bug, or if it's something that I'm doing incorrectly.

I've attached a file that this error occurs during the render.  I suggest you adjust the crop region to the bottom half so you directly start rendering the water.

All help is greatly appreciated.

EDIT:  I just realized that this is posted in the wrong forum.  If any mod would be kind enough to move it, that'd be great.

[Seth]

yeah... crashes with water shader when there are lots of reflects...
known bug...

[Heeshung]

Is it possible to lower the reflections to the point that it will finish the render but without any noticeable differences in the render itself?

[sonshine777]

Yes you can lower the reflective and the roughness also. I've gone as low as .65 and still had fair reflections.

[Oshyan]

The roughness is generally the biggest culprit here. These problems should also be improved by the renderer changes we're making and which will be made available in the upcoming beta.

- Oshyan

[Heeshung]

Is it the reflections, roughness, or both?  I've had other renders that crashed with roughness at default, and reflectivity at 1.

[Oshyan]

It's the combination of roughness and reflections, but the reflection rendering is what ultimately causes the crash. It's roughness that tends to trigger it though.

- Oshyan

[Seth]

...yeah i think reflections causes the crashes too because i rendered water with 0.01 roughness many times and it did crash...

[lightning]

mine doesnt crash it just takes a century to render

[Seth]

mine doesnt crash it just takes a century to render

you must thank god to that, man ! ^^'

[JimB]

Not enough RAM? How much have you got?

[Seth]

nvseal works with 512 RAM... i think.
and when you see the quality of his renders... and the relative small amount of time it took him... i don't think RAM is a big problem for TG2.
perhaps it's a mistake but... look at his renders and time

[JimB]

Well, I'll take your word for it. But raytraced reflections in any guise, in any 3D app, usually have a massive price to pay in RAM ... or something. Is there any way to reduce the size of the render tiles? That usually gets me out of all sorts of trouble in Mental Ray.

[Cyber-Angel]

Well, I'll take your word for it. But raytraced reflections in any guise, in any 3D app, usually have a massive price to pay in RAM ... or something. Is there any way to reduce the size of the render tiles? That usually gets me out of all sorts of trouble in Mental Ray.

I think that is basically true however I would think that the impact on system RAM management and for that matter CPU Cycle Time of Ray-Traced Reflections would depended on the type and implementation of Ray-Tracing used by way of example pure Mote-Carlo vs Quasi Monte-Carlo methods or other techniques. Any way the Pipeline of such an application should have techniques in place such as effective garbage collection and code recycling to minimize its footprint to the extent that is both practicable and within reason.   

There must be some research out there some where that describes a method of Ray-Tracing that is more memory and CPU efficient then current techniques that could be adapted for use in some future version of Terragen: what that method is or its authors name I cannot say but some thing some where must be of use.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel