Time to generate very large terrains?

[sciophyte]

I was going to start a new thread about this, but this one almost fits...

I spent a few months generating small terrains for testing purposes and finally got down to do a very large terrain on sunday. I was doing a 31km2/1m resolution mosaic map. It took until last nite to get the heightmap completed, all was fine up until this point. I started the attributes map to generate overnite, when i checked on it this morning, my computer had also reset overnite and upon opening up the map, my design map was no longer there but my heightmap was, I continued the process and when i came home from lunch I had the normal map completed, I began to start my Lightmap at lunch and it got part way through saying "heightmap is invalidated...", something along those lines and now the process has been started from the beginning. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, is the design map used in the lightmap calculations? if not, what transpired to say my heightmap was invalidated when it did the attributes and normal maps fine...anyway, a bit frustrating, but that's the computer world in general i guess. Any insight into why this may have happened would be great, I've now decided I will be snagging one of my business servers to bring home as a dedicated rendering machine for the time being, hopefully I can attain some preventative measures for next time if I can figure out what went wrong.

Edit: I'm using L3DT Pro 2.5

[Aaron]

Hi Sciophyte,

L3DT automatically saves mosaic maps to disk, but doesn't automatically save non-mosaic maps (you have to hit 'save' for those). Thus, when your system crashed, L3DT had saved the heightfield (a mosaic) but not the design map (a non-mosaic), which explains why you have one and not the other. The good news is that, based on the heightfield, L3DT can back-calculate the design map using the 'Operations->Design map->Generate from HF' option. You won't need to re-generate the heightfield or anything like that.

As for the 'heightfield is invalid' message...I'm not sure. Could you send me the logfile? It's in the start menu at:

Start->All programs->Bundysoft->L3DT [version]->L3DT log file.

As far as I can recall, the invalid flag is not saved/loaded, so if you save your project and re-load it, the flag will be gone.

Best regards,
Aaron.

PS: I am working on an 'undo' and backup / crash recovery plugin now.

[sciophyte]

aaron,

thanks for your quick reply. That's great that I can regenerate my design map from the height! you are genious. I'll send my logfile right away.

thanks again!