Do tiled builds only produce result files after "all builds are done"?

Help! How do I...
#1
  1. Do tiled builds only produce result files after “all builds are done”?

A few minutes ago I was trying to export a 100km x 100km terrain to 20 x 20 tiles (which took almost 24 hours), but due to an unexpected problem, when the build was about 50% complete (about 12 hours passed), my PC crashed.

But I didn’t worry about it.
I thought I only needed to make the remaining 200 tiles from the last tile that was being built. But when I checked, none of the resulting files were generated for the tiles that were built so far.
So I have to redo the above behavior from the beginning.

  1. Is it normal to consume so much time and memory when building tiles?

My PC has 16 GB of memory. However, it was not enough to build tiles 20 x 20 with a resolution of 2048 x 2048 pixels.
It takes more than 24 hours and sometimes uses more than 20GB of memory. Is this normal? How to create terrain in this situation?

  1. I apologize if this topic was a duplicate. I’m not good at English, so I couldn’t find an answer to my question on this forum. So I created a new topic like this.
#2

Check your OS drive, does it have enough free space? If no, then that’s the source of your problem, and read on. If there’s enough free sapace and no access issues, ignore the rest of this tirade.

Tiling swaps a lot of data to disk, and crashes when there’s not enough disk space, or if the swap folder is inaccessible. The default folder tiling writes to, is here (I think, I have a custom cache location):
“C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\World Machine Release\temp”

You can change this location. Go to the menu bar>Project>Program Settings. Then go to the “Paths” tab. Here you can change your default temporary location.
Screenshot of this dialog:

Program settings
Program settings678×675 17.8 KB

World machine will then always swap to that location only. Screenshot attached. In case of a crash, data should be cleared on world machine restart.

About the tiled build merge behavior though…

World machine processes one tile at a time, and takes into account some extra area (governed by your blending percentage). That part is done with the build. The “merging” of these tiles however, is a post process, and this is the part that’s disk swap heavy. The “Write file to disk” occurs AFTER this merge step. Any file write issues on the disk where your temporary folder resides, will crash on this post process. So no actual data is saved since it crashed during an intermediate process.

Hope this helps, good luck!

#3

  1. Thank you for answer. But I have enough disk space… The crash was caused by another issue that I am aware of. But thank you.

  2. Does that mean that if a tiling build fails for any reason, the only way is to try again from beginning?

#4

@adelto Yep, if no files were written to your target destination, you have to start your build from the beginning. The graph itself however, is autosaved after a crash. You can at least recover your project upto the point before you started build.

#5

Thanks for your reply. I’ve understood that you mean, after all, I have to risk wasting time when building large terrain that takes a long time.