Tiled build does not start after changing tile resolution

[dean]

Salutations from a new user!

I went for the release candidate to get my feet wet with world machine, but ran into an issue when trying to run a tiled build. If I change the resolution of each tile to anything higher than 256, the tiled build confirmation dialogue box that summarises the files to build is empty (in that it does not list the nodes I set-up to export), and clicking “yes” does nothing.

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Confirm Tiled Build

Are you ready to perform a tiled build?

&Yes &No

Setting it back to 256 allows the project to build. Am I doing something wrong?

[Stephen]

Hi Dean,

Welcome! Huh. That definitely doesn’t sound correct.

I suspect that what’s happening here is that a build validation error is occurring. I discovered that 4011 doesn’t issue validation warnings when they don’t pass. This is fixed in 4012.

Given that it works at 256 and doesn’t above that, my guess is that there is a disk space problem on either your temporary folder or final destination folder. WM tries to make sure there would be enough space to build before doing to prevent a lot of wasted time and effort.

Can you confirm if you have enough plenty of disk space to build the project at the requested size?

[dean]

That seems to be it! Seems like I need quite a bit more space. I moved the temp directory mapping to another drive, and managed to increase the resolution to somewhere around 800. Is it normal that it would take several hundreds of gbs for a large tiled map? I’ve freed up 350GBs, but it still won’t let me go above a resolution of 800, even if I only select a single tile to be exported.

It mentions:

total dimensions: 64576x64576, 1.39m/pixel, 2.8GB memory needed to build 8 tiles at a time.

[Stephen]

WM does a tiled build in two stages. First, for each output, it builds and saves in an internal format all of the tiles, and includes extra data necessary to blend them together. After all tiles are complete, it goes through and produces final outputs in the formats you specify.

If you’re building a final resolution of 64k x 64k, that is indeed a lot of space. Depending on your blending setting, additional information beyond the tile is also built, requiring up to double the original resolution of your tile if you have blending percentage set to 100%.

Just doing some rough estimates, 64k resolution with a tile resolution of 800 gives you ~80 tiles a side, is that correct? That’s 6,400 tiles, where each temp tile output could require up to 30MB for an RGB datapacket when including blending. That would be 192GB for just a single bitmap output. So depending on your complexity, I could easily see it…

[dean]

Gotcha, I thought it would only build near areas I selected for export. I’ll play with map scale vs hard drive space a bit.

Thanks for explaining!

[Stephen]

That is true actually - all those estimates above are for the worst-case where you’re exporting a full tileset. If you have it set that high but are only exporting a small fraction of them, the validator is probably being overly pessimistic! I’ll double check that it is only counting necessary tiles.