Strange rendering problems in CC3+
So I've finally started trying to use CC3+ for my main mapping projects, which use the Modern City (2007) and Modern Political (2010) annual styles. I am on Windows 7.
When I go to render an image (I prefer using PNG, but this issue happens whether I use that, JPG, or BMP), the command window opens and it zips through a bunch of passes, but then when it gets to the last one, it either:
1. disappears very fast, in which case, no image is created at all. Or
2. it simply hangs. It's not frozen exactly, as I can still move the window around and minimize it. But it won't go away. (CC3+ itself, however, IS frozen at this point; it's in "Not Responding" mode). If this happens, then I can go into the folder while the command window is still up, and see a (temporary) BMP file, which I can open and view. But when I close the command window by hitting the X, it and CC3+ close, and that BMP file disappears.
I noticed that no matter how high I set the anti-alias, the temp bmp that I can view seems to have no (or at best, very little) anti-aliasing on it. Because of this, I thought I'd try rendering with the anti-alias box unchecked entirely, and sure enough, if I do that, it renders fine. The command window appears, zips through all the steps, pauses for a sec at the end, then disappears automatically, leaving me with a normal PNG (that doesn't disappear when the command window and CC3+ are closed).
Not sure what to make of this. Before this all began, I grabbed update 14 so my CC3+ is on version 3.80. The installs for Modern City and Modern Political are also fresh, as they were both downloaded and installed only earlier tonight (since I missed the announcement that all the Annuals were ready for CC3+, I've simply been continuing to use vanilla CC3 for the last several months, so it wasn't until tonight that I even attempted to use + with those two annual styles).
Here is the command window at the end of the process when it fails to render - the text that appears at the end is the same regardless of scenario 1 vs. scenario 2 as I outlined above.
And here is the command window at the end when it succeeded in rendering an image with AA turned off. The only differences I can see between the two would, I assume, be because the first one has AA on (thus the extra text about resizing and filters, and the higher number of rendering passes).
When I go to render an image (I prefer using PNG, but this issue happens whether I use that, JPG, or BMP), the command window opens and it zips through a bunch of passes, but then when it gets to the last one, it either:
1. disappears very fast, in which case, no image is created at all. Or
2. it simply hangs. It's not frozen exactly, as I can still move the window around and minimize it. But it won't go away. (CC3+ itself, however, IS frozen at this point; it's in "Not Responding" mode). If this happens, then I can go into the folder while the command window is still up, and see a (temporary) BMP file, which I can open and view. But when I close the command window by hitting the X, it and CC3+ close, and that BMP file disappears.
I noticed that no matter how high I set the anti-alias, the temp bmp that I can view seems to have no (or at best, very little) anti-aliasing on it. Because of this, I thought I'd try rendering with the anti-alias box unchecked entirely, and sure enough, if I do that, it renders fine. The command window appears, zips through all the steps, pauses for a sec at the end, then disappears automatically, leaving me with a normal PNG (that doesn't disappear when the command window and CC3+ are closed).
Not sure what to make of this. Before this all began, I grabbed update 14 so my CC3+ is on version 3.80. The installs for Modern City and Modern Political are also fresh, as they were both downloaded and installed only earlier tonight (since I missed the announcement that all the Annuals were ready for CC3+, I've simply been continuing to use vanilla CC3 for the last several months, so it wasn't until tonight that I even attempted to use + with those two annual styles).
Here is the command window at the end of the process when it fails to render - the text that appears at the end is the same regardless of scenario 1 vs. scenario 2 as I outlined above.
And here is the command window at the end when it succeeded in rendering an image with AA turned off. The only differences I can see between the two would, I assume, be because the first one has AA on (thus the extra text about resizing and filters, and the higher number of rendering passes).
Comments
Have you installed the latest update? (I think we are at 14 now). I had a problem very similar to this one for about a week, but it disappeared when I updated CC3+
When you are running without anti-aliasing, this process is MUCH faster.
Just to clarify (and I should have mentioned this in my first post, but I forgot about it): this is all with effects off. In which case... I would assume it's not supposed to take that long? On vanilla CC3, with no effects, I can export an 8k by 6k resolution image in the Modern City style with 50% AA in about 45 seconds, so... I can't imagine CC3+ would need that much more time to do the same thing. I'll try to give some more time tonight - more than a couple minutes, that is.
- You can export much larger images than before
- The antialiasing step is now handled by ImageMagick AFTER the export, which means the speed of this step is NOT affected by effects on or off. The main issue here is the amount of memory your map takes (which depends on map size and "visual complexity"), because that means it can't keep everything in memory at once, severely slowing down the process. Because of this, you can't get the same lightning-fast export as you could in CC3 with effects off if you have antialiasing on. (Effects still affect the internal rendering steps in CC3+ though).
- You can actually replace the ImageMagic executable shipped with CC3+ with a 64-bit one, and tweak the command line parameters, which can give you a severe speed boost if you have a fast computer with lots of ram
On the other hand, I did notice that CC3+ is clearly capable of exporting much larger images than CC3 was, which is a big plus. So I'll have to see how this all shakes out. It will also depend on just HOW long it takes - with Modern City, I don't need effects. With Modern Political, however, I very much do use effects, quite a lot. I'll have to test out how long it takes to export with effects vs. what I am used to for vanilla CC3.
I do have a Windows 10 Dell XPS 13. So what I can do is install CC3+ and the annuals on there, and try it out - that way maybe I can at least see the progress indicator you mentioned Monsen, since it doesn't show up on my Win7 desktop (which as you alluded to might be a Win7 issue).
Also: I've been operating under the assumption that I cannot make changes to a map in CC3+, save and close, then open that same map in vanilla CC3? If I can, then one oddly amusing workaround would be to work in +, export in + when I want to do a huge image with effects on and everything (in which case I'd know I'd be in for a long wait anyway), but save and jump over to vanilla CC3 whenever I want to do a quick export with no effects but still have AA. This is DEFINITELY something I'd be interested in trying out! How would I go about doing this?
See here
The rendering process for a large, complex map at high res, with lots of AA and with effects on, will still take a long time. BUT, given that that isn't anything new (renders at that kind of resolution and AA of my map took 45+ minutes on vanilla CC3 anyway- assuming they even finished which was hit and miss), I'm not too bothered by that. I only export a full ver of that map with effects on when I reach a major milestone or something, so it's not like I'll be having to wait for that every day.
This is especially good news for my Modern City maps, since those don't use effects, so I can quickly export high AA images.
As I mentioned before, I hadn't used CC3+ much until a couple nights ago since I hadn't realized the annual styles were all ready to go, so during all this render testing I've been doing these last few nights, I noticed that the general rendering passes themselves - while they may not be any faster than vanilla CC3 - are much more stable. With vanilla CC3, it'd often go into "not responding" seconds after the rendering began. Often I'd have to just pray that at the end of the rendering process, it doesn't just crash and burn. And there was no handy command window showing the precise status of each rendering pass, something I really appreciate in plus. AND of course, last but not least, the fact that it can render larger images with higher AA in the first place.
Speaking of Modern City and high resolution: as a test, I exported my work-in-progress city map and cranked everything up just to see what would happen: 8k by 8k resolution with no effects, but with 60% AA. CC3+ rendered the image with a whopping 121 passes. But it still only took a few minutes for the passes, the AA part at the end still flew by thanks to the 64-bit executable, and the image successfully rendered - in vanilla CC3, even with no effects, the program would just crash if I asked it to render an image requiring that many passes!
At this point, I'm struggling to think of a reason to not just fully jump over to using CC3+, rather than vanilla CC3...
Monsen pointed you to the discussion on replacing the ImageMagick used in CC3+ with the 64-bit version. I'd like to point you to the discussion on increasing the MaxPixelsPerPass setting as described in this thread. In the next update, there's a command to set this value directly, which will make things a little easier. By adjusting the setting as described, you should be able to get that 8kx8k export down to very few passes.
The default export settings in CC3+ were chosen for safety and compatibility, not speed. Performance tuning in CC3+ (especially upping MaxPixelsPerPass and adjusting the ImageMagick settings) can get you a whole lot of improvements in the speed of your export.