LWO Export hangup

Started by Mohawk20, December 04, 2008, 05:30:19 AM

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Mohawk20

I'm trying to export an lwo of the island in the river of my Hanging Valley project, so I can make some objects that fit the scene perfectly sizewise.

I set the camera to Orthographic and disabled all the nodes I don't need, like clouds, the water, trees etc.
After the rendering is finished it doesn't say "Finished rendering", but it says "Rendering (time...)" and the time is not increasing. I thought it would take a little while to finish the lwo file, but after 48 hours, nothing has changed, there is no lwo file in the specified folder.
Is the render crashed? Did I do something wrong (a good possibility)?

My brother tried it first on his pc, and it did the same twice.

Attached is the tgd...
(If you wonder what the name means, it's Gaelic for Sunny Garden)
Howgh!

Matt

It may be that the exported LWO is too large. At 1024 x 1024 @ detail 1.0 you're probably generating at least 2 million micropolygons, maybe a lot more (I haven't rendered it yet). I don't think the LWO Exporter can handle that much data, unfortunately.

If you need high-res data in certain places, do low resolution closeups of those places. If you export multiple LWOs where you need them, they should load into your modelling app nicely without you needing to reposition them. The LWO Exporter will probably work OK with renders of 250 x 250 @ detail 1.0, or renders of 500 x 500 @ detail 0.5. The total number of micropolygons is usually the main problem, but I don't know what the exact upper limit is at the moment. If 250 x 250 @detail 1.0 doesn't work, try something smaller.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

JimB

Speaking of LWO export, I'm having trouble importing into XSI TG2 LWO's over roughly 10.4 Mb filesize. I have to do multiple cropped LWO renders so that each part is less than that figure. I also tried to import a large LWO into a 3D converter but it looked corrupt. Any clues?
Some bits and bobs
The Galileo Fallacy, 'Argumentum ad Galileus':
"They laughed at Galileo. They're laughing at me. Therefore I am the next Galileo."

Nope. Galileo was right for the simpler reason that he was right.

cyphyr

#3
Try running the LWO export through Poseray, the .obj output will retain all the relevant data (scale position etc) you need to do your modeling in XSI.
Hope this helps
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

JimB

#4
I tried that, Richard, but Poseray says the LWO model has no vertices or faces. with the message "Model could not be loaded".
Some bits and bobs
The Galileo Fallacy, 'Argumentum ad Galileus':
"They laughed at Galileo. They're laughing at me. Therefore I am the next Galileo."

Nope. Galileo was right for the simpler reason that he was right.

cyphyr

#5
Hmmm are you using the Heightfield operator "Heightfield Export LWO" or the LWO Micro Exporter in the render tab? I've had much better success with the LWO Micro Exporter. Remember to kep your resolution and dimension settings down.
richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
/|\

Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

JimB

Quote from: cyphyr on December 07, 2008, 12:48:38 PM
Hmmm are you using the Heightfield operator "Heightfield Export LWO" or the LWO Micro Exporter in the render tab? I've had much better success with the LWO Micro Exporter. Remember to kep your resolution and dimension settings down.
richard

The LWO Micro Exporter in the Render tab. As I'm using  XSI the number of polys doesn't mean much at all, XSI being able to handle massive amounts of polys. Once loaded into memory the renders fly, but the biggest overhead is setting up the crops for each partial render, then bringing them in bit by bit. It could take a fraction of the time to do (and I'm talking real fractions) if the LWO export was good for large meshes beyond this 10+Mb limit. What should take 20 minutes is taking up to two hours, which is eating into my deadline.
Some bits and bobs
The Galileo Fallacy, 'Argumentum ad Galileus':
"They laughed at Galileo. They're laughing at me. Therefore I am the next Galileo."

Nope. Galileo was right for the simpler reason that he was right.

Matt

#7
Can you check whether XSI has any known compatibility problems with "LWO2" objects above a certain number of points? 10.4 Mb sounds like it might be around the threshold where the vertex indices need to switch into a 32-bit format to encode more than 65279 points. I tested this with Lightwave a while back (maybe version 7 or 8 ) and it read large LWO2 objects from Terragen without any problems. I haven't tested it recently though.

(Edit - if I recall correctly, I tested with files up to about 32 Mb.)

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Matt

#8
It looks like the theoretical maximum number of micro-triangles which the LWO Micro Exporter should be able to handle successfully is 5,592,405 (about 5.5 million). That many triangles will produce a LWO file of approximately 298 Mb. I have not actually tested this, however.

Other practical limitations may come into play with such a large file. It might not really be possible to export a file that large.

The point at which the formatting of the vertex indices switches to 32-bit is only 21760 micro-triangles, which gives a file size of about 2.51 Mb. So that doesn't explain why problems might start at 10.4 Mb.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Matt

#9
Something to be aware of is that TG temporarily allocates a buffer in memory which is the approximately the same size as the file it produces (or maybe about 1 Mb larger). Also, during rendering it has to store these triangles in memory, although it doesn't need as much as the size of the file. It all adds up though...
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Mohawk20

Thanks for all the info Matt!

I rendered the scene again at 1024x1024 but at detail 0.25 and it worked fine. Got a file of about 50 Mb from it...
That does explain why the program couldn't finish at detail 1.
Howgh!