Twilight V2 x64 Bit Crashing all the time (RESOLVED)

[simulat]

Hi Chris,
Any luck with looking at this file.. It is getting worse and worse, I've been creating new files and taking just the scenes I need to render over.. That will work for a little while but then they begin to crash with changes too. If I go back to V1 will any of the new lights work, or will I have to redo all of those again?

Thanks

[Fletch]

I'd go back to v1 until this is sorted, but it is not 64bit.
V2 lights will not work in V1, sorry.

[simulat]

Did anyone look at the file? Was it crashing on your end too?

[Chris]

Sorry for the delay simulat.

I have the file. It is crashing on me too, which is good news. I'll work on figuring out what's going on and hopefully we'll get a fix.

[Chris]

I'm still working on this one. I have found where it is crashing but not why. It is very, very strange.

Aside from that, some comments on your model.
- Never allow lights to intersect geometry. You have many lights that are intersecting roof, walls, and background planes. This will cause visual problems with your render and will also waste render time.
- You have a 6000x6000 pixel texture. This is enormous. It wastes RAM and render time. Take a look at your texture sizes, as you also have several others that are in the 1000+ pixel size. You can probably reduce many of these.
- The radius of a light only effects it's Soft Shadows. There really isn't any reason to have a light 8 ft. in diameter. More likely than not, this will reduce the quality of your render and increase render time.

I'll continue to try to find the reason for the crash. It is one of the strangest I have seen.

[simulat]

Thank you for looking into this Chris! I'm very happy it's happening for you too, I thought I was going crazy with how weird it would act sometimes.

Thank you for the render tips too, my timeline is so compressed most of the time that I have to do these in a single day. So I don't get to spend too much time with textures and I usually am just grabbing stuff I like and throwing it in. Those large ones are much bigger than I usually use. As far as the lighting I was not aware of some of the notes you made. I did know if a light is in my FOV it will cause visual problems on walls, but I usually have them outside of my FOV. I have done a lot of testing with different setups in V1 and have just come to an aesthetic that I like with large low output lights for fill. If the lights intersect geometry outside of my view does this still effect the render? Either way I will keep this in mind for the future. All this aside I have been doing drawings similar to this for years on a 6yr old computer and never once had it crash from twilight, some took forever to render but no crash.

Please let me know if you find anything or anything I could do to mitigate it in the meantime. I have to get through the job I'm on and then I'll be able to switch back to V1 I don't have much time to mess with changing it now. Have to build all of these in a week haha

Thanks again

[Chris]

It looks like it is a memory problem in the Kerkythea render engine. Yes, it's ironic that there is a memory problem in the x64 version. It will only occur when the render engine loads an image texture after SketchUp exceeds a certain memory threshold.

I've contacted the Kerkythea developer with the problem. Hopefully they will get it fixed for us quickly.

In the meantime, there are two things you can do.
1. Reduce your texture sizes! Image textures are the number one consumer of memory. Anything over 1000x1000 pixels is probably too big unless it's for a large render of a product or something similar (where close detail is important).
2. Hide everything that isn't visible in your render. If your model is arranged in multiple scenes, this should be easy to hide what isn't necessary for that specific scene. Then jumping between them should automatically update the visibility. Reducing geometry (especially alot of those high-detail components!) will keep memory usage down.

Once the model is loaded into the render engine and no further image texture loading will occur, there is actually no limit on memory. You can render a 20,000 x 20,000 pixel image if you have enough RAM and a powerful enough machine. It's just that image texture file loading process where there is a problem.

We will let you know when the issue is fixed. We appreciate your patience.

[simulat]

Awesome thank you for finding this, I hope they can fix this quickly too.

I will work on doing the things you suggested.

Please keep me posted if you hear anything.

Thanks!

[jhatfield]

I look forward to this being fixed as well. I have the same problem. In my case, if it renders the first time, it will crash after the 2nd. So, it will be nice to see this fix. Twilight 2v is really a great product and once it gets a few of these bugs fixed, it will be one of the best.

[fcborik]

Hello,

I have the same problem. I'm trying to clean up the model, and I'll keep trying some of the "tricks" to get the model to load in the rendering engine. Would be happy to send you the model if you think it would be helpful, but it looks like you're hot on the trail. Please let me know if you want a copy of the model I'm working with.

Thanks!

Frank Borik