[REQ] Limits warning

[solo]

So I was playing around on a rather large terrain today and I decided to see how it would look with the stock short grass preset, so i clicked it and then the terrain to generate, it crippled my machine to a point after 20 minutes that i had to do a hard reboot. I was wondering if at all possible a warning notice could pop up when you are about to commit to a skatter that is greater that what ones machine can handle?

[solo]

Or failing that, if we could somehow terminate using ESC button?

[jiminy-billy-bob]

Yes indeed we need some kind of warning to prevent that.

Would you consider this is high priority?

[solo]

Yes indeed we need some kind of warning to prevent that.

Would you consider this is high priority?

I'd say yes, as many new users may not have more than 12gb ram which IMO is a bare minimum.
I'd rather have a user get a warning and make adjustments than have a crash.

[Rich O Brien]

Anyway to launch from terminal so the process could be cancelled when it goes outta control trying to compute?

[NigeC]

+1
it can go wrong very quickly

[jiminy-billy-bob]

Anyway to launch from terminal so the process could be cancelled when it goes outta control trying to compute?

You mean without launching Sketchup?

[Rich O Brien]

No, I launch Blender via the terminal at times to prevent my PC from freezing when I go to far with particle systems or computations.

I can hit CTRL+C to stop the process in the terminal without needing to hard reset the PC.

Just wondering if some workaround could be found to start SU from the terminal so any silly freezing can be stopped.

[jiminy-billy-bob]

I have no idea

But you're still able to kill the Sketchup process from the task manager.

[Rich O Brien]

No, there are times when Skatter completely kills all operations.It is as if the....

[NigeC]

its quite a big bug bare with a lot of SU plugins that you can't cancel the operation and you have to kill SU
totally agree with Richard, I've gotten a bit to enthusiastic with Skatter and totally ran out of system memory to the point Windows is totally frozen and need to shut the whole thing down... this computer has the Intel Storage manager and rather full hard drives so it takes ages to come back up to speed after a forced restart

[solo]

Having the "live preview" option remain unselected will be a start, as it enables itself all the time and one needs to constantly remember to switch it off.

[Pixero]

I had some issues yesterday when using a highres ground for Skatter. Had to repeatedly force quit SketchUp.
I ended up doing a more reasonably resolution'ed ground for the scatter and then hide it on a layer and turned on the highres one for render.

[jiminy-billy-bob]

Yes, when projecting down, Skatter compares each point against each face of the surface. So the more faces in the surface, the more time it takes to compute.

The algorithm will be vastly improved in the future. With something like AABB tree, or by using Intel's Embree

[Oboter]

Yes - a warning would be very helpful - also some "I'm working" symbol (like the little watch in photoshop). Testing the limits caused some headaches the past days

I'm working on a 2011 macbook pro which is fine for sketchup, okay for light weight renderings but hell for heavy duty stuff. But due to the fun of Skatter and the promising results in the "show your work"-area made me consider moving my 3D and rendering stuff to a pc.