Tiled world input, number / Size of tiles issue

Bug Reports
#1

Hi there

My question is regarding tiling DEMs again.

I have to tile an area that is 1540 Kilometers by 1760 Kilometers

Divided into 224 DEMs each DEM is 110/110 Kilometers each DEM is 1200 pixel square

The DEM all tile perfectly obviously.

when taking them into world machine it basically crashes when i input the above scales into the project settings and the tiled file input settings.

I am not sure if WM can handle that amount of tiles? or is it the scale itself.

Any input on the matter would be appreciated.
:?

#2

Hi Ahmed,

You should be able to work with that amount of tiles; although there is certainly a lot of data there, it’s all well within the realm of what people work with. 224 DEMs of 1200x1200 is only ~1GB of terrain data, which should be well within bounds.

My first question is that how/when does WM crash? And are you certain that it is actually crashing? I ask because after setting up the tiled file input device, the next thing that will happen is that WM will read and create a cache pyramid of every individual DEM file so that it can fluidly display the terrain. This initial caching process can take quite a long time for large amounts of data, and there is currently no feedback that this is happening, making it seem like WM has simply locked up. If it is crashing at that point, I would check in the windows resource monitor and see if there is actually large amounts of disk IO occurring. If so, this is just the caching process and it will eventually finish and the UI become responsive again.

Worth noting that WM will have to do this every time you load the world file, which gets to be a drag. One of the enhancements I want to make soon for large worlds is to add the ability to save the cache file to the current session so that you don’t have to suffer a re-cache every time you start working again. (And of course, to actually provide a dialog to let you know that this process is happening, and its progress).

If the above is not where you’re having issues, let me know and we can keep investigating!

#3

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your quick reply, I have an updated about the problem I have been having.

It did crash before and left me a bunch of error messages.

But I have rebuilt the scene from scratch again using the actual extents that I wanted which was 1760 Kms x 1430 Kms

I have changed the settings for the tiled world input node.

And that seems to have stopped crashing now, so its all working well.

I have noticed that I was running out of space on my hard drive as the temp files for WM increased rapidly, every time WM crashed it left me with 10s of gigs of scene data, which I had no idea about.

So we added an SSD drive and rerouted the temp files to that drive.

And it all seems to be flowing nicely.

I have attached a screen capture of my settings, if any of it looks wrong please let me know…

I will post some images of my work in the work in progress section very soon.

Thanks again

Ahmed

I am sure I/we will still have a lot of questions, but so far we are very very impressed with this software.

#4