Can World Machine freeze but still be using resources?

Help! How do I...
#1

Hello,

Quick question here. I started building a map I put together yesterday, everything was going well with the build until it got to the “Create Water” device. Total build time at this point is just over 17 hours of which almost 11 has been on the Create Water device (the last device to build besides some height map outputs). I went to bed last night thinking the entire build would be done this morning but it’s just stuck on that device at 33.3%. My task manager still shows that World Machine is running and using 80-90% of CPU and about 11GB ram.

I have never used the create water device before so I am wondering if it is by far the most complex device to build or if somehow the program is frozen and still eating resources. Any insight on this would be appreciated.

More Info:
PC:
CPU 12900k
Ram 128GB
GPU RTX 3090

Map:
Build Resolution 32768x32768
World Machine Pro: Artist Point

1 Like
#2

@Charm8er I assume you cranked up that “discharge scalar” slider to the max (16)? That’s what made create water take so much time at that 33.3%. It’s an expensive setting, but the alternative is using manual rivers for thicker parts, and it doesn’t work as flawlessly with create water currently (boundary issues mostly). I personally am just using Discharge Scaler setting on my end right now.

Few devices like create water and flow restructure are very slow right now, it’s just how it is. It’s not your system, it’s just how the algorithm works. Bound to be improved in the future, hopefully.

#3

The discharge scalar was actually fairly low like around .26 I think. I hope you’re right though. The flow restructuring only took about an hour to complete. Erosion was 5 hours. Now on 12.5 hours of create water and it’s still stuck at 33.3%.

1 Like
#4

@Charm8er Hmm, interesting. Usually it’s that setting. Try setting it to default (1). See if that improves that “33.3%” condition.

What resolution are you building at? Those are insane numbers, especially considering your 12900k (I have an i9 7900x, kind of an earlier revision on your CPU). Must be a very complex graph, or 16k resolution.

#5

Running it at the custom resolution of 32768x32768. I probably should have used the tiled build but figured with this new rig it would be able to handle it and worst case just take 12 hours or so. Idk. I built out a tiled build that was a total of about 100k x 150k in 12 hours on my old 5950x build. This is just crazy it’s taking so long for 32k with my PC specs.

If I cancel the build will it keep everything built up to that device? Or does it have to start over completely?

1 Like
#6

@Charm8er Ahhh, so there it is. Water devices being incompatible with tiling, are being built in one big, high res chunk. That’s why they are bottlenecking the build.

About comparing with your old build, 5950x had 16 physical cores if I’m not mistaken? Should be exponentially faster, especially in apps like world machine that aren’t yet optimized for those new “efficiency” cores on your current build.

If you cancel now, it will take some time. But if it does complete that cancellation without crash, the devices built completely should keep their built data. Do note that you may still lose that data from your memory if you edit anything, especially resolution or tiling settings.

#7

@Charm8er Oops, misread your comment, the part about tiling. My mistake, ignore the part about tiling incompatibility. The resolution is too high, slowdowns are within expectations then.

#8

So after 14 hours on the create water device still stuck at 33.3% I decided to cancel the Build and now it has been stuck canceling for nearly an hour. I think world machine did lock up even though it doesn’t show that it’s not responding.

#9

So I ended up force closing world machine and restarting the computer. Restarted the build and it completed in just under 13 hours. I clicked okay and world machine quit responding but ate up all of my ram and had a very high data transfer rate going to my SSD.

After about an hour it calmed down and started responding again so I went to start exporting my files and it’s saying that I need to build it again…

I wonder what happened. Any ideas?

#10

@Charm8er With lack of memory enough to hold data, wm swapped a lot of data to disk. It’s that paged data that’s causing issues with slowdowns, along with OS being paged to disk as well due to memory not being available. WM dumping data seems logical in that case, especially if you have any form of “memory conservation” enabled in your project settings.

What you need to learn, is to break your project down into parts, spread it across multiple stages. And learn some optimization techniques if you want to go that high resolution. If you’re hitting memory walls with 128GB RAM, you’re going to be in deeper trouble when you start with materials.

Try the method I described in this tutorial project, but with multiple wm projects. Link them through library caches. This way you’re only holding parts of data while you’re building, saving memory. Great general optimization technique (I built terrains with 16gb memory, on a laptop, for clients, under deadlines using this technique once upon a time).

Besides that, try using fewer nodes per project if you wanna go that huge on resolution. I don’t know what kind of organic details you want, but that high resolution is impractical imho, people use all kinds of techniques that are much more art-directable than brute forcing everything in one go. What’s the point of these granular details if you can’t even make edits to it after builds…?

1 Like