Recover Temporary Image after Crash + Tips to Avoid Crashing

The Twilight Render Team shares tips, ideas, helpful hints, and more on using Twilight Render
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Fletch
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Recover Temporary Image after Crash + Tips to Avoid Crashing

Post by Fletch » Wed Oct 20, 2010 9:00 pm

computer_crash_1.jpg
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A temporary image file is saved while you render with Twilight.
Twilight Render User Manual wrote:XP: C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Twilight\temp\tmp_inprogress_image.png
Vista: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Twilight\temp\tmp_inprogress_image.png
Windows 7: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Twilight\temp\tmp_inprogress_image.png
Windows 10: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\TwilightV2\temp\tmp_inprogress_image.png
If you were rendering using a progressive render method (interior, interior+, and exterior methods only), and it was almost finished when the crash occurred, you may not have to worry.
BEFORE STARTING ANOTHER RENDERING, find the temporary image file and open it in an image editor like Photoshop CS3, or Picasa (free from Google)

See this image example for how to tone map the image in order to recover it:
tmp_inprogress_image.jpg
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The "Offset" in the Exposure control panel of Photoshop is very important, and very touchy. Holding the shift key when your cursor is in the input field, then using the up and down arrows allows you to move in increments of tens instead of ones while keeping your eye on the details in the image.

:idea: Tips how to avoid crashing while rendering:
computer_crash_2.jpg
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  1. Avoid doing ANYTHING while Twilight is Processing or warming up a render. After it begins the Ray Tracing step, feel free to resume work... but while it is processing it can take a minute or two before you can have full control back. Be patient, you have given your machine a lot to think about!
  2. Keep an eye on your RAM usage, if it's getting close to 85% full, close as many applications as possible on your machine to give Twilight room to work. Surfing the web with lots of tabs open can eat up a lot of RAM fast. Working with a lot of images in a photo editor, or working with a lot of images in Windows Explorer tends to eat up RAM fast as well.
  3. Avoid minimizing/maximizing SketchUp a lot if the Twilight Render window is open. When re-maximizing Sketchup's window with Twilight Render's Render Dialog open and rendering, be patient while your machine 'catches up' to all that is going on... it can take even up to several minutes before it settles back into normal operation. It may even appear to be frozen while it is actually only thinking very hard. Avoid clicking this and that over and over if it seems stalled, you may cause a crash when it was going to be coming back soon. If you've waited 5 minutes, and still it seems frozen, then likely it is. Check your number of threads processing - if they are all still at 100% it may still be thinking. If the processor usage has dropped back to idle, then it's likely frozen. Now you can try to recover the temp image BEFORE starting to render again.
  4. Keep the Twilight Render window closed as much as possible while it is rendering. Now Twilight will only need to think about rendering the image, and not about how to draw it and tone map it on the screen for you to see.
  5. Avoid navigating in SketchUp's view, while the Twilight Render dialog is actively rendering... this slows things down considerably and can lead to crashing... especially on middle or low-end systems. Systems with High-end graphics cards and RAM and CPUs may be able to get away with this just fine.
  6. Be sure that auto-update for windows is disabled.
  7. Be sure that your screensaver is also extremely simple or disabled. A screensaver that only shuts the monitor OFF after a certain period would be best. Graphically/CPU intensive screensavers are a waste of resources and slow everything down.
  8. Windows 32 bit does not let SketchUp access more than 2Gb of RAM. This is very limiting to Twilight. You may have 12Gb installed on your machine, but it's not allowed to be accessed by the 32bit application. For the adventurous, you can try this for getting an extra Gb of RAM... Make Windows XP (+Vista/Win7 32bit) access more RAM If you are running 64bit Windows System, then it will automatically use 3Gb and maybe even a bit more.

marvins_dad
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Re: Recover Temporary Image after Crash + Tips to Avoid Crashing

Post by marvins_dad » Thu Oct 21, 2010 12:29 pm

Thanks for the info and tips! ;)
Before my Win7 machine I was crashing all the time and knowing this might have saved me multiple times...now that I know that this is out there, I will check it out next time I have a crash.

Thanks!

derei
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Re: Recover Temporary Image after Crash + Tips to Avoid Crashing

Post by derei » Thu Jun 30, 2011 8:44 pm

I just lost a render because of Windows Update... it updated nVidia card driver and when I restored SketchUp from bar, It raised an error about open gl that lost connection with graphic card, or something like that. I found my tmp_inprogress_image.png, but I could not restore too much from it. As png it lost a lot of color information.
maybe in next version will be a better way for avoiding this? Like automatic save as .hdr in temp?
ARTIST AND DESIGNER DEREI.UK

Fletch
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Re: Recover Temporary Image after Crash + Tips to Avoid Crashing

Post by Fletch » Thu Jun 30, 2011 10:12 pm

You should disable all auto updates while rendering. This causes instability.
You have an automatic save feature in Twilight, it is not in the advanced settings, but you should choose your own incremental save type in the Render Dialog, and choose .hdr if you wish. That feature is there because of this reason. The .tmp file is a last resort.

derei
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Re: Recover Temporary Image after Crash + Tips to Avoid Crashing

Post by derei » Fri Jul 01, 2011 4:24 am

Fletch wrote:You should disable all auto updates while rendering. This causes instability.
You have an automatic save feature in Twilight, it is not in the advanced settings, but you should choose your own incremental save type in the Render Dialog, and choose .hdr if you wish. That feature is there because of this reason. The .tmp file is a last resort.
I know, and sometime I use automatic save, but not all the time, as the default is "Manual Save"... I just hit render. You realize that after one hour of render, I don't stop it to change the settings because I forgot when it started :lol: ...
But I'm telling you about Maxwell Render again... it saves a .mxi file in the installation directory,if I don't give a saving path. It's the same every time... kind of temp file. Like that temp .png file, but at full quality. This should be a good feature. think about it...
ARTIST AND DESIGNER DEREI.UK

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