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High quality rendering problems since PhotoVideoRendering plugin 2.2a
I'm running Sweet Home 3D 6.5.2 under MacOS 11.4 Big Sur on an M-1 Mac Mini. For the past month I've been working happily and creating lots of high quality renderings for a personal project.
I installed the PhotoVideoRendering plugin a couple of weeks ago, which has worked pretty well with some limitations (Yafaray rendering crashed SH3D, but that seems true of all of the rendering plugins that use Yafaray on my Mac).
A couple of days ago the PVR plugin appears to have upgraded automatically to the 2.2 version, and that's when all of the problems began. The symptoms evolved over time and are mysterious. They were annoying at first, but now are serious. They started with the rendering running very slowly and freezing; "completing" but with some squares un-rendered; crashing; and now generating a blank gray image in quality levels 3 & 4.
For a while I could use the standard Create Photo dialog which worked (slowly) even as the plugin was giving problems; but no longer. Currently any quality 3 or 4 rendering executes quickly but generates a blank gray image, whether executed via the plugin or via Create Photo.
I've tried uninstalling the plugins, exiting and re-entering SweetHome 3D; rebooting MacOS. Makes no difference now and I can't do any high quality renderings.
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Re: High quality rendering problems since PhotoVideoRendering plugin 2.2a
Did you try to increase the max memory used by Sweet Home 3D? Or try YafaRay rendering plug-in which might work differently? By the way, note that there's no automatic upgrade of plug-ins.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
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Re: High quality rendering problems since PhotoVideoRendering plugin 2.2a
Thanks for weighing in. Much appreciated! I did edit the SweetHome.cfg file and increased memory from 2000 to 4000m. The FAQ suggested I might need to run a Terminal command to get MacOS to permit me to edit the file, but my experience was it allowed me to save the changes without a challenge, so I didn't go into Terminal.
In any event, the standard Create Photo option still generates a plain gray image. I then re-installed the YafaRay plugin and it does the same thing (though generating the gray image in a circular fashion rather than rectangular).
What's odd is that there seems to be some sort of persistent memory leak that cuts across all of the high quality renderers. For a while the SunFlow renderer was not working in the plug-in, but was in the Create Photo dialog. Then it started to get flaky, and now generates only a plain gray image as well.
Is there a way to perform a clean reinstall of 3D Home while preserving points of view and libraries? I've got a lot of work invested in creating texture and furniture libraries, as well as creating stored points of view... I would hate to lose that work.
But for weeks the program has worked reliably. YafaRay rendering was always flaky, but SunFlow worked ok.
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Re: High quality rendering problems since PhotoVideoRendering plugin 2.2a
BTW, I've attached a high quality rendering that was one of the last that actually generated an image. Note the three squares which never rendered in the center. However, even though it didn't "complete" properly, it thought it was done and allowed to to use the save option.
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Re: High quality rendering problems since PhotoVideoRendering plugin 2.2a
Sigh. So now the problem seems to have fixed itself. This morning after I booted my computer I went back to an older version of the house model I'd built, and tested the Create Photo in high quality. It worked normally. Then returned to the model that's been giving me trouble, coming out plain grey, and it worked OK as well.
Coincidence? I'm at a loss to explain what happened or why (yesterday, I had tried fixing this problem via a cold reboot, and it didn't help).
Wondering if it's a Rosetta 2 issue with the M1 Mac... are the rendering libraries native M1 code, or are they Intel? If written in Java, it may not matter.
Anyway, it's been a very flaky and at times frustrating ride, but for now at least, it seems the problem is gone. I suggest we leave this thread open for a while in case problems resume.
Is anyone else running Sweet Home 3D on an M1 Mac? Wondering what your experience is....
