Serious rendering problems

Rosemont_Line

This is a very long post, but I wanted to document this thoroughly.

I've noticed for a LONG time that when CC3 has a large rendering job to do (say, 7 or more passes when rendering a PNG or BMP), it goes to "Not Responding" mode partway through the process. Now, the rendering still continues, and the image file is eventually produced, but the program basically freezes while it's working. This is odd, but ultimately harmless.

However, this evening I started putting the anti-alias setting higher in the BMP/PNG/JPEG export options, because my exports looked pretty awful (REALLY bad jagginess on the coastline, symbols, and lines when exporting a large map; in my case, it's 2100x1300 "measuring units" in CC3). But I still need to export a large image. Putting a high anti-aliasing setting with a high resolution causes it to do like 50 rendering passes. Which, with effects on, will take forever, but I don't have a problem with that. But, the program simply crashes ("fcw32.exe has stopped working"), every time. This is with the effects on or off. So I began testing:

-A render requiring 31 passes (PNG export at a resolution of 7000x6000 with 45% AA), succeeds.
-A render requiring 48 passes (PNG export at 4000x3000 with 70% AA), fails on the first pass.
-A render requiring 32 passes (BMP export at 8500x7500 with 35% AA) failed, but on the last pass, not on the first. So the "cutoff" point seems to be there. 31 passes is ok, 32 and it chokes.

And I did try smaller maps, changing styles (to see if the problem was ONLY with Modern Political, but it still happened with the stock CC3 style), and giving the program High priority in Task Manager. No change.

What got me started with playing around with the settings for exports and finding this crashing problem were these roads, made by the "Superhighway" tool in Modern Political, that still looked jaggy even with settings like the "succeeded" one above. Look at the red and white path on this cutout here:


That still looks pretty jaggy, even when everything else (including other paths) looks pretty decent (though in that shot, the gray single-line road still looks kinda jaggy too). And in the upper right portion of the path, right where it connects to that northeast city symbol, the red sort of bleeds away on the left side of the path. So I'm trying to see if I can do something about that... I have no problem whatsoever with the rendering process taking forever and a day because I'm trying to render a huge image with effects and super crazy AA on, I just want it to work when I do that, if at all possible.

What's interesting is that for those particular lines, increased resolution seems to help just as much as increased AA. And if I export just a section of the map using the "rectangular section" option in Save As, everything looks way better than it does in the full map (the below image was exported at 4000x3000, with 50% AA, and required only 11 rendering passes); even the symbols look smoother. (Don't mind the mountain contours looking a bit pixelated this close up, that's because of the scale settings I have for them, so I'm not concerned with that):


I almost wonder if there is some way to take advantage of that... export the map in quadrants or something, generating four separate images, then stitch them together in Gimp. But I'm not sure how I could make sure they were precisely cut and reconnected...

Anyway, sorry for the huge post, but I wanted to provide a lot of detail about the rendering issue as well as the jaggy lines that led me to it in the first place. Have you guys encountered this before? Not sure how to proceed here.

Any help is appreciated!

JimP

When I used a very detailed bitmap fill on a 1000x800 deckplan, it took around 2 minutes for all 16 passes it made to create a png.

But CC3 only uses 2 gigs of ram. And doesn't use your video card. That could be the reason.

Rosemont_Line

I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that CC3 is just incapable of exporting above a certain level of quality? Even though the option is there to do so? That would be pretty disappointing if true... Again, I don't mind if it takes a really long time to render because of how high the resolution and AA is. And everything does look ok at settings like 6000x5000 with 50%AA, except for those roads. But, if I WANT to export a crazy high quality image at times for some reason, and try to get those roads more smooth looking, shouldn't I be able to? The program allows for the option, but then can't do it. This feels like a glitch or something to me, not a limitation.

Partly because of the speed at which it renders. That's one of the big things that makes me think something is wrong. For the renders that crash at the last pass (which is renders requiring between 32 and about 40 passes), everything is FINE right up until the failure. Until the crash, it moves very quickly, zipping through the passes like it's no big deal. If effects are off, it goes at a rate of 1-3 passes per second, fluctuating a bit depending on the complexity of the map. (I mentioned above that even on a successful render, the program sometimes goes into lockdown mode while rendering, and just says "Not responding", with the red info bar stuck until the render finishes. However, it doesn't always do that, sometimes the GUI stays normal throughout the whole process, and even if it doesn't, I can simply time the entire thing, from when I hit "save" to when it's done rendering, to get an idea of how quickly it's going.)

It renders really quickly, like nothing is wrong. Then, when the process is done, if the number of passes was 31 or less, it finishes and I get my BMP or PNG, every time. Between 32 and about 40 passes, crash at the end, every time. More than 40 passes, crash on the first pass, every time.

That seems way too weird to just be "you've hit a limitation of the program". At least to me.

Rosemont_Line

Update:

Tried saving to my other hard drive, just to see if that would help, either because its an SSD, or because the drive that the rendered image is being saved to would be different than the drive on which the map is stored. But there was no change.

Tonight, I cannot get CC3 to complete a render that requires more than 20 passes if effects are on. (I have only tested effects-on renders a couple times, of course, because it takes a LONG time to do one, so I cannot report very thoroughly on consistency in this case). This is even more puzzling, since last night I was able to render fine with the effects on as long as I stayed under the cutoff point I reported above (i.e. as long as it didn't require more than 31 passes). I don't know what would cause that change.

Really not sure what to do on this one. Completely baffled.

Ralf

There is indeed a hard limit what CC3 can export - but it differs from system to system and therefore we cannot give a general limit of what is possible. That said, we are working on an improved bitmap export function, one that also gives reliable feedback on the export's progress.

You might also want to try a PNG export using a PDF printed like PDF995. It allows you to specify a PND file as the export result and in some cases allows higher export resolutions than CC3's export function.

Moskva

What does this antialias actually do?
I've never used this function before and I'm wondering what antialias settings would be useful to improve output quality.

Rosemont_Line

Posted By: RalfThere is indeed a hard limit what CC3 can export - but it differs from system to system and therefore we cannot give a general limit of what is possible. That said, we are working on an improved bitmap export function, one that also gives reliable feedback on the export's progress.

Wow, so I was way off, heh.

That is kind of weird, I would think the "limit" would be higher on my machine (it's an almost brand new custom build with an i5-3570 and 8 GB of RAM), and furthermore, on Friday night, a render requiring 30 passes (with effects on) succeeded, over the course of almost an hour or so, while we were watching Star Wars in high-def on the same computer (from an .mkv file stored on the same hard drive). The render went fine and there was not even a little stutter or anything in the movie. So it's just odd that it can do that, but then a render requiring 32 or 40 passes - with no other programs at all running - fails. And I really have no idea why, on Saturday, suddenly it couldn't handle anything more than about 20 passes if the effects were on. O_o Hopefully that was just a fluke.

I wonder if it's possible to look at taking more advantage of the hardware present? JimP mentioned CC3 only uses 2GB of RAM, I take that to mean, no matter how much is physically available to Windows 7, CC3 will never utilize more than 2. Which I suppose means my 8GB don't really matter anyway. And it doesn't make use of video cards, either? Perhaps those things would be useful. Of course, I know very little about just how difficult/feasible it would be to add in such functionality, but maybe whenever the next "major" update comes around (i.e. on the level of the move from CC2 to CC3), those options could be looked at.



Any ideas on why that one road type (the red and white paths from Modern Political) stubbornly refuses to look as smooth as most everything else around it unless the AA and dimensions are set crazy high? That's what started this whole rondo at my end.

I did figure out a sort of work-around involving exporting multiple rectangular sections and then stitching them together in Gimp (I tried this out, and it does work, although getting them to line up is hard... it seems like there's always a little discrepancy in the resulting large image no matter what I do). So at least I can do that if I really NEED to export a high-quality image of a large map. Still, definitely happy to hear that you guys are working on the export issues! The work-around will... well, work, pretty much, but it is kind of a pain, so I hope for progress on this front. And thanks for always listening and responding to issues like this, I know there are always a lot of things to sort through and this is a complex program with a lot of quirks. It's nice to be able to know that I can post questions here and get help from people who are actually directly involved with the thing!

Posted By: RalfYou might also want to try a PNG export using a PDF printed like PDF995. It allows you to specify a PND file as the export result and in some cases allows higher export resolutions than CC3's export function.

Here, I'm afraid you lost me, haha. Do what, now? Are you referring to something in the export settings within CC3, or the use of some kind of external program?

@Moskva: If you look back at the two pictures in the first post in the thread, you can see the "jaggy" effect that is present on the red/white road path in the first picture (where the path doesn't look smooth, it has jagged lines everywhere it curves), but looks way more smooth in the second picture (for both, I suggest clicking on them to view the pics at their full size, rather than simply looking at the scaled-down versions in the post). Anti-aliasing helps to eliminate that effect, but of course, the more AA you tell the program to use, the harder it has to work and the longer the render will take (and as has been the point of this thread, past a certain point, it just isn't gonna work). The essentials guide (or was it the user manual... one of those) usually recommends 25% AA for large, detailed maps. This usually seems to turn out pretty well, though there are exceptions, the road I'm dealing with being one of them. And of course, anything higher than 25% and things get problematic.

Ralf

The problem with the red road is probably the white line in the middle, basically creating 3 distinct, high contrast lines next to each other (red, white red) that are very hard to render. Perhaps try using just a red line instead.

As for the PNG export through a pdf printer, install for example PDFCreator on your system. Open your map and print it, choosing PDF Creator from the available printers on your system. An output dialog comes up and you can choose (under Profile) to save the printed file in a variety of formats, jpg and png among them.