Does saving as a rectangular PNG work better in CC3+?
I use CC3 a lot and I mostly use it to save the maps I make as rectangular PNGs for use in virtual table top software. I understand why CC3 has problems being a 32 bit program, but is CC3+ large address aware natively? Or would I continue to need to kludge a work around to get my big maps to export to PNGs reliably?
Comments
What's the problem with exporting to png?
I can export anything up to 10,000 x 10,000 px rectangular pngs no problem.
For instance, right now I am saving a 12000 x 8000px png with sheet effects turned on. It has been 42 minutes since it started and it is still running. CC3 is currently using 1.6% of my available ram and 4% of my available CPU. CC3 is having an aneurysm and hanging with a (Not Responding) tag because it can't handle the process.
If I shut sheet effects off is handles it a lot better and works much faster, the same map would save in 3 or 4 minutes.
The way that CC3 and CC3+ handles effects is to render the context of a sheet to an in-memory image, apply effects to that image, and then composite that image onto the cumulative image so far. The CC3+ infrastructure is much more efficient at processing than the CC3; the CC3+ effects were modified to be more efficient in terms of memory usage and to take advantage of more modern processor architecture features. When effects are turned off, each sheet is immediately rendered to the final image and things go much, much more quickly.
One consequence of the CC3/CC3+ effects processing pipeline is that images can easily get too large to fit into memory. When exporting large images, those images are broken down into a series of overlapping passes that are rendered individually with each pass rendering a segment of the final image. CC3 has a hard limit of 4 million pixels before the image is broken into multiple passes, while CC3+ allows this parameter to be modified via the main program's configuration file. Increasing the maximum number of pixels allowed in a pass will reduce the total number of passes required, making the overall process much more efficient.