Sequence tab / browser tray crash Carrara (SOLVED)
DADA_universe
Posts: 336
Got a little ambitious with Carrara and I've been getting away with it thus far, but.....I've been building a large scene with replicators, everything else works fine, but at a point with the browser / sequencer tab minimized, if I try to maximize it, Carrara crashes. If I opened a blank project first and then tried to open or import my large scene file with the browser / sequence tray maximized, Carrara would crash. But if the blank project had the browser / sequencer tray minimized, the file would open okay. I 'saved as' a few times and emptied the Daz temp folder to no avail. Any tip on fixing this would be most appreciated as I'm almost done with scene building and would like to try out a little animation now, which won't be possible without the sequencer tab. The file size is 70.6mb, also wanted to include the polygon count but I can't remember where to get that info within the project.
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I work for the moment on a sequence of 150 images which makes 391 Mo and I never had this problem.
If that crashe with the loading, try to save your project uncompressed and reload it…
Guessing... the issue might not be the Browser so much as the Open GL preview.... suggest you change your preview of replicated instances to bounding boxes, and possibly reduce the res of your preview textures.
What Holly said, and also make sure you have removed unused objects and shaders under the Edit Menu. Also you could try lowering the texture spooling (in preferences I think, under Imaging and Scratch Disk). You also may be able to disable the Show Objects in 3D view checkbox. This will not effect the final render. All it does is save Carrara from drawing them in the assembly room.
Sci-Fi Funk has some youtube video tutorials about building large city scenes. They should be linked to here in one of the stickied threads at the top of the forum or over at the Carrara Cafe.
http://carraracafe.com/
Thanks a lot DUDU, Holly and EP. I've taken time out to try all you've suggested but unfortunately, the mystery continues, the file still crashes. Any further thoughts on what to do would be most welcome.
@EP...I've been following Sci-Fi Funk, though I've not seen all his tutorials just yet, a lot of his techniques have been useful for what I'm working on, together with random stuff I've gleaned from all you great folks on this forum.
Which quantity of RAM do you have on your motherboard and your graphic card ?
To answer of your first question, here some infos…
For the number of polygons, you can see in modeling room for each object, but there is the total weight of textures which you find in the render room…
Okay, thanks for that, guess I can't check each object in the model room given that there are sooo many objects, but I can see 7.94 GB for the texture size under the render room statistics/ progress tab, I'm using a Core i7 Dell laptop with 6GB of ram running Windows 7. And an Nvidia graphics card (Geforce GT 525M with 1Gb dedicated video memory.)
Edit: The file contains 7349 objects, 1 light, 7275 master objects and 1074 shaders.
You have a 64 bit system, but you're hamstrung with this scene due to lack of RAM I think. If you can, I would increase your RAM substantially. If you can't, then I would consider looking at the scene and breaking it down with the idea of compositing elements together in a video editor.
Already had plans for the RAM, I suspect though that there is something within the file I can still do to 'unlock' the sequencer and browser, I'm thinking this way because Carrara still handles the file very well without stress despite the size, I've been able to do a whole lot of work on it after the problem started way before it grew to its current size, so I think the RAM can still hold out, though I may be wrong. Breaking down the scene and compositing would be such a bother! I thought about using the panoramic spherical image technique to create a background with the scene and then animating the characters against that background but it would require the camera being rooted to one spot and the whole essence of creating a big scene was to be able to have great camera sweeps......for example, I've been aiming at having a camera follow a boat down a canal from one end of the scene to the other.
Apparently Carrara will only employ one core for the assembly room preview because multi-threading is reserved for the rendering room, so boosting the ram will only help me render faster.....this much I gleaned from this thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/27788/
Evilproducer had already mentioned this, so I didn't add to it. But:
When I'm working with scenes that have a massive number of objects like that, I've found that I can slow down my navigation to a crawl, yet the render engine doesn't complain in the slightest (EDIT: When rendered in the Render Room or Batch Queue). So after I get lots of stuff placed where I know it will stay - at least for now, I deselect that "Show in 3d View" box. While all of that stuff still appears in the render, I can now navigate the scene in working view as if it isn't even part of the scene. I love that!
So then if I need to work on an area that I have hidden from my working view, I select to show it again, and shut off what I don't need to see. Make my adjustments, additions, etc., shut off the 3d view again and then turn on my foreground once again... save. I can even save my large scenes like this with the previews that I like so much! Sure, it might take a little extra to render that preview, but I like them! ;)
A huge habit that I maintain when working with vast numbers of objects is to constantly go: Edit > Remove Unused Masters > (all three options listed below in the order I operate)
> Remove Unused Objects
> Consolidate Duplicate Shaders
> Remove Unused Shaders
This helps to keep the file size as small as possible in the system memory department. It's so easy to make a new copy of a shader, I'm never nervous to remove one that I 'might' decide to change later. If it's a duplicate... get it off the memory.
But I am absolutely amazed at how high of number of objects I can have in a scene! As soon as it starts to feel sluggish as I pan and rotate around in my scene, I look at stuff that I don't really need to see, group it together (sometimes this might not be best, so I'll make several groups instead) and un-check "Show in 3d View"... BAM!!! responsive again! But if it's not, then I move on to more items that I can hide from my working view in the same manner.
In my EnvironKits, there are lines of text in the instance tray (that right tab where objects are listed under Scene). If it helps to leave notes to yourself, all you have to do is to make a group and then drag everything out of the group, so it's empty. Now type whatever you want in the title of the group. When the line is getting too full, just 'Ctrl D' to duplicate that empty group, clear the text and type more into that one. That's how I made those info lines of text, then grouped the lines naming the group what that info pertains to. I Love Carrara! There's like... no memory being used up on that text - but it's there, so you don't have to use your own memory!!!
I used to use Target Helper Objects for text until I found this much better method ;)
So then I would have almost my entire scene invisible in my working mode. But when I do a test render, it all appears in the render. For times when I don't want that, I have all of these easy groups to choose from for visibility On/Off as well. Very easy, very fast, very Carrara! So for an example, you could leave yourself a note that all of the groups between these lines are invisible:
**************************************
Invisible stuff
**************************************
Then save. You'll know when you open up again, that this stuff is shut off from the render. Eventually you'll want to leave them Visible in the save for Batch Queue Rendering - a great way to render very large scenes - as they can be saved and closed, then opened by the Batch Queue only during rendering.
The more RAM will still help even if you're using one core, since Carrara loads the scene into RAM. The other issue is the graphics card, since the Assembly Room uses OpenGL. You could try to further reduce the workload on the card by turning off options in the Interactive Renderer, which was already mentioned (a little up-arrow in a circle icon at the top of the Assembly room window). Make sure the texture map size is set as low as it will go. Try turning off reflections and transparency to see if it helps. You could also try reducing other settings or disabling other options. What you do in the Interactive Renderer will have no effect on the render.
One other thing you could try in the Interactive renderer is to switch from OpenGL to software as a test to see if you get the crash. If it's on Software already, try switching to OpenGL to see if that helps.
I spent the past few hours trying out absolutely everything suggested all over again and I'm happy to announce that finally, the problem is solved. After narrowing down to what actually solved it through further tests, I discovered turning off the largest groups of objects in the scene from being shown in the 3d view was what stopped the sequencer from crashing Carrara and once I saved the file after the sequencer popped up without incidence, the file has been loading fine even with those large groups turned back on in 3d view, the sequencer does not crash Carrara anymore. So it seems the cookie for this one goes to Evil Producer as supported by Dartanbeck. Everyone who posted here has been helpful, I've learned quite a few useful tips for my Carrara utility belt and I'm grateful. Please accept this still from the WIP as a mark of my thanks! ;o)
Screw the image, I want my cookie! ;-)
Seriously, that looks like it will be an impressive scene. I can't wait to see what you do with it. I'm glad we were able to help.
BTW, depending on how you set up your scene, a spherical render can be very convincing.
Hmmm.... I thought I had two angles in this scene. I must have posted the wrong one. Anyway, the foreground building and the ship are actual geometry and the city in the background is a spherical render.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN6E8ji3oHA
That image... what a wonderful Thank You! Thanks! It's freaking awesome!
What a killer scene!
Thanks gentlemen, you're far too kind, it's a beast of a scene, at least for my skill level, I'll keep battling with it till I get what I want out of it and I'll share here, then I'll scale back to smaller scenes where I can work at improving my animation capabilities without the stress of big scenes, at least I have an idea of how far I can push Carrara now!