SU + Twilight Not responding for >5h renderings

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epkboan
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Oct 04, 2017 6:48 pm
OS: Win10
SketchUp: 2017

SU + Twilight Not responding for >5h renderings

Post by epkboan » Wed Oct 04, 2017 7:08 pm

I've been using Twilight frequently the last months (previously exported from SU to kerkythea) and i'm happy for the intuitive UI! However when doing renderings for more than 5-6 hours. The Twilight window hangs "Not Responding" and i haven't been able to do much more than to kill with task manager.

If i export to Kerkythea (from the TwilightRender) it can render for days without problems so i'd say it's not a real stopper for me. I.e. i can modify, add the materials and do quick renderings in TL and then when doing final rendering just export. Still a big time saver!

But what is the best way to troubleshoot the hanging Twilight Rendering?

Twilight PRO user on SU2017
i5-4460 3.2GHz 16GB RAM 64bit Window 10 Home

Chris
Posts: 5344
Joined: Sun Mar 08, 2009 3:00 am
OS: Win10
SketchUp: 2016

Re: SU + Twilight Not responding for >5h renderings

Post by Chris » Wed Oct 04, 2017 8:03 pm

That is strange behavior and it shouldn't be doing that. It sounds like your CPU is being over-tasked. Between 100% usage for Twilight Render and whatever it can scrape up for everything else, I'm guessing something is getting locked up. Assuming that is the cause, the easiest fix is to set Twilight Render to use the maximum number of threads minus one. In the render window, open the MultiThreading dialog and change it from automatically using the max number of threads to whatever your max is minus 1. I believe your CPU is a quad-core, so set it to three. This will make your render run slower (perhaps as much as 25% slower) but it will leave at least one of your cores available for basic computer operations. And hopefully stop it from freezing.

epkboan
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Oct 04, 2017 6:48 pm
OS: Win10
SketchUp: 2017

Re: SU + Twilight Not responding for >5h renderings

Post by epkboan » Thu Oct 05, 2017 7:29 am

Ok, i'll give that a try! But the desktop remains pretty responsive and it's possible to do other stuff too even if running at 400% and it's only SU + twilight that is freezing. So my interpretation of that was the deadlock (or whatever) occurs within Twilight. If someone want to debug it i don't mind digging into details

Paul Russam
Posts: 94
Joined: Thu Aug 27, 2009 9:18 am
OS: Windows 10
SketchUp: 2017 Pro

Re: SU + Twilight Not responding for >5h renderings

Post by Paul Russam » Fri Oct 06, 2017 10:43 am

It'd also be worth disabling all power saving features in Win10, I've had similar problems in the past that were cured by ensuring that the cpu, monitor etc stays at 100% all the time.
I regularly render over the weekend(72h) without any problems.
Paul Russam

epkboan
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Oct 04, 2017 6:48 pm
OS: Win10
SketchUp: 2017

Re: SU + Twilight Not responding for >5h renderings

Post by epkboan » Fri Oct 06, 2017 6:12 pm

Thanks! The machine is always on and power savings are set to never enter any power save mode. But the monitor goes off after 10min so it might be worth keeping it on and run with all threads again.

The workaround with just using 3 threads seems to do the trick at (26 hours no hanging so far)

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