Hello,
I'm seeing a problem where, during a render, one or more of the threads crash with 'An unknown error occurred in a render thread'. In my first instance of this, one of four render threads died (4 cpu system). When the thread died, this left the other 3 threads running. The problem is that when the thread dies, it leaves the tile it was working on unfinished. No other thread realizes this error to go back and finish that tile. Instead, the tile where the thread died remains unrendered (black or mostly black). Since I've found no way to tell Terragen 2 which tile to work on specifically, there's no way to, other than guessing by using the Crop function, to get that area rendered.
The second time I've seen this issue, all four render threads failed with that same error as above. So, it appears that when a thread dies, it does not restart itself. Instead, the work it was doing is left unfinished and the thread does not restart. This issue leaves the render window open hanging waiting for the render to complete, yet it will never complete because the threads died. In the case of all 4 threads dying, I had to manually kill the render because the render window apparently doesn't keep track of thread failures.
I would suggest that if a thread dies, that either 1) stop the entire render process or 2) restart the thread picking up where the dead thread left off. It would be best to attempt to restart the thread and let it continue to render. However, if the thread continues to fail, then close the entire render. The way it works now, it's impossible to complete the render of a scene when the threads randomly die. I would also suggest hooking up the render window to the status of the threads. If all threads fail, the render window should mark the status of the render as finished with errors.
This issue doesn't happen until the second stage of the render begins. So, it gets all the way through the lengthy dotty tile sequence and then these errors occur during the second stage of rendering (when it begins to fill in the tiles with the final image).
Note that this is in TP5 (1.9.99.1) operating on Windows Vista with a quad core and 3G of ram.
Thanks.
--
Brian