Twilight 2 crashes on render

[muralmaster]

I believe I found the why of the problem. See images. To save a step I usually place png or tga images without a placemat. Never seem to have a problem with twilight v1, or a least, I never notice anything wrong. After experimenting with the files as shown, both png and tga files acted properly in both tests, except the ones used on the model. This was quite puzzling. Why did both png and tga files without placemats worked in both tests but not in the model? Then it hit me: because in the tests I place all files on placemats and then erased then for both png and tga. So to test this I used a couple of placemats on the model, imported two png files, erased the bounding placemats, and voila, problem solve. So I guess I will be using placements from now on -a least until Twilight version 3 finds a different way to deal with it.

2- testing png and tga transparencies with and without placemat.jpg (736.27 KiB) Viewed 8093 times

testing png and tga transparencies with and without placemat.jpg (633.97 KiB) Viewed 8093 times

Solution: use placemant, import png or tga, erase placemant.

testing ground.jpg (497.61 KiB) Viewed 8093 times

[Fletch]

Thank you for the report and persistence to find the cause of the crash.

1. This crash is, at least partly, related to memory. On this test machine when the RAM is near full before rendering an immediate hard bugsplat will occur. Meanwhile, if the RAM is not full, the .tga files render perfectly in our tests. There is clearly something strange happening in this file in SketchUp because it seems to be a massive file for no clear reason. This is, as near as we can guess, related to the use of the .tga images.
2. What is a "placemat/placemant"? Do you mean that you exploded the image to be on a face? Or do you mean in imported the image as a material texture instead of as an image?
3. We would like to "fix" this - Please post a link to a test scene that fails every time so that we can test. We have tried to recreate your issue here, but all .png and .tga files we created work perfectly.
4. It is recommended to use .png files, not .tga in the future. You can see that SketchUp does not fully support .tga files. When you are in SketchUp's Material Editor and choose to open and edit the .tga file in an external editor, it opens as a .jpg file. So SketchUp itself is handling .tga files in a strange way.
5. .tga files are clearly not reliable in this context. Meanwhile, .png files carry their transparent pixels in a straight-forward and clear manner resulting in them being handled perfectly in SketchUp and Twilight.
6. After creating several .png and .tga files from scratch for testing - saving in all available types of format of .tga and .png and inserting them into SketchUp as images the scene rendered successfully in all cases.

[muralmaster]

Sorry, I'm primarily a muralist and without meaning used our own slang instead of proper SU terminology. A "placemat" is a blank panel or space in a composition that stands in place of an image or design that will later replace "the mat". What I meant to say is that I create a face over which I would them import and position an image, usually a jpg. In this particular model, since I needed a transparency, I created a face on which to import a png or tga file. Once the image was positioned on the face, I then proceeded to erase the face and the edges -EXCEPT for one or two faces of the many imported files that made the metal railing in the model. On these I erase the faces but left the edges making up the shape. Without this final step the png or tga's would render out of place. So I my guess is that the geometry of those two shapes "glued" or anchored the rest into place. By the way, it would also be nice if an image file would not disappear when making a copy of an original model that contains such image. And, if images would rendered without disappearing when included in a group or component that would be even better. Having to re-import the same image on every copy can get old. Thanks. -j

PS -I will send a copy of the model to Fletch.

[muralmaster]

I forgot to mention that I have almost 3 TB of available memory. However, I have no idea what's the memory ceiling for SU. I'm using windows 10 -64. The test model is less than 50mb. Crashes went down considerably if I first save and then render. Not a clue why this is so.

[Chris]

The issue could be related to images that are "glued" to a surface... especially if that surface has been later deleted. We'll have to look into that.

The 3TB on your computer is (I'm assuming) your hard drive space. This is not the same as RAM, which is memory the computer uses while running programs. Usually computers these days have somewhere between 4GB up to 16GB, with the majority being somewhere around 6 or 8GB. If your computer is using the lower end (~4GB) it is easily possible to run out of RAM at which case SU crashes.

[muralmaster]

How can I determine how much memory is the computer using to run this particular program?

[Fletch]

hold down all three buttons together: Shift+Ctrl+Esc
Task Manager will open.
Click "Performance" tab
Here you will see Memory Usage
Click "Memory" to see details.