Ive been building a terrain with some erosion and coastal erosion. If I choose a tile size of 1024, it renders each tile in more than a minute (with 6% blending)
If I make an extent that is 2048 by 2048, the same as 2x2 tiles, and render it as single shot, it takes less than a minute to render (and this is 4x the size!)
Am I doing something wrong? (tiled runs with 1 simultaneous build)
[I’m not the author!!]
I think the tiled build is a work around to give us the possibility to render at resolutions that, for a matter of RAM, normally we couldnt use.
What the tiled build does (I’m guessing) is treating each tile as a separate heightfield, so that WM can load in memory as many tiles as there’s room for and nothing more. So, in theory, with this method you can render extents as large as you want at any resolution you want.
The other side of the coin is that there are devices that dont work too well with tiled build because of the very nature of their effects. Erosion, I think, is one of these, as terrain flows will most probably move over tiles’ edges.
So, instead of 1 extent you have 4 and each one of them needs a separate calculation for each device along the chain.
Plus, if you want the tiles to perfectly match, you have to use a high “Blending Percentage”, which slows the whole thing down even more.
- NOW -
How to solve this problem.
If you need a tiled build and RAM is not a problem for you, then I suggest to do as described in [this] post.
Also read [this] one, where you can find some other small helpful notes about this method.
If, instead, you have RAM limits that dont let you render at the current resolution, but you have problems with the tiled build, you can still render your chain in “stages”.
What I mean is that you can save single stages of your chain as RAW/PNG heightmaps and reload them through File Input devices. This way you will save a lot of memory by giving WM a single heightfield in place of the enormous amount needed for a normal chain. Not to mention the rendering speed.
If, instead, you use a resolution so high that even a single heightfield is too big to fit into your memory, then there’s no other way but doing a tiled build of your chain. Just remember to set a high Blending Percentage and rent a movie to kill time while waiting…