Sky Preset Not Saved
IceScribe
Posts: 693
I'm continuing to find my way around with some of the basic Bryce functions. I did a tutorial using a star field with moon. Then I am learning how to edit the stratus only cloud in the DTE. I get something that looks good. I do a render, and it looks good. anNext I save as preset in the Sky menu. However, after I've added it to a blank thumbnail, 2 things happen.
A red capital H appears in the lower right corner of the thumbnail
The clouds disappear, my edit is gone.
The next render from the selected sky preset that I just added renders without the clouds. The moon is stil there.
Last night I was learning how to position the moon, and to use "custom" star to get a recognizeable star field. I liked the Orion and
Pleides I saw. I saved the preset, I thought, but it was gone when I began this afternoon. I thought I was just sleepy and didn't save it right. But that is not the case with the clouds.
Can someone tell me what the H means and why it seems associated with sky presets I tried to add, and why they did not save as rendered? Using Bryce 7 Pro
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I don't know what the H refers to. Regarding the clouds and learning from David's tuts I think you need to save it as a texture.
Someone else will correct me if I'm wrong.
Hmn... that sounds like a bug. Could be an incompatibility between an old sky save format and a new one. If you can cut the process down into a short series of steps then I will try and replicate the bug and see if I can figure out what's happening. As things stand your description is a bit too vague.
The "H" though is easily explained. That indicated that there is a HDRI image associated with the saved sky. If there is not yet the H still persists. Then yes, that is certainly a bug.
I recommend... using empty skies and adding clouds in other layers. The cloud editing in Bryce Sky Lab is definitely buggy!
aaa finaly found my .bsk bug :lol: which i was trying to explain to David and David told me that might be the 2gb file limitation but its not that.
I found this bug some time and i even created a screenshot .
As David specified i can confirm , DO NOT SAVE a .bsk file if you have a hdr added(activated) to the sky lab .
This creates an 100mb :bug: .bsk sky instead of ~ 100kb .bsk usually and if you save the bsk in a subcategory it will DESTROY that subcategory , making it unusable anymore but still the subcategory icons will be displayed normaly.Also every presets saved will increase the size of the subcategory with 100mb each time because it doesn't matter, each new bugged file has 100mb. (tested and btained 3 times same size with different skies)
I will add the screenshot maded by me as soon as i'll find it on my computer stored somewhere.
Note :
1. a .bsk preset file is usualy ~ 100kb , not 100mb
2. the 100mb size might vary to other OS im not sure about others but it is present on xp sp3
You can create a cool sky and save it a scene then you can start to add your terrains and objects :-) like i did with http://www.sharecg.com/v/63776/view/5/3D-Model/Tibetan-Sky-for-Bryce , also you can add a sky slab too to the scene
Yes the 2gb limitation issue, as Cris says, is liable to result in unusable subcategories if skies with HDRI are not saved with care. The best thing to do is to create their own category and save only a dozen or so at a time in any category. They can be saved. But with the file size growing at such an alarming rate... don't be surprised if you occasionally go over your limit and trash the .bsk
The other thing to note - on a related topic, is that if you have a HDRI sky and use sky memory dots the source file for Bryce can grow alarmingly. Since the memory dots save a duplicate of the sky - the entire sky data - including the HDRI. So loading in a fairly high rez HDRI say 30mb and then happen to store this sky in three memory dots and you suddenly grow your source file by 90mb! Which is somewhat troublesome because Bryce is very bad at garbage collection and just turning off the memory dots is often not enough to free up the memory. Worst case, you will have to migrate your scene to a fresh launch of Bryce - which is both fiddly and time consuming.
So... a couple of things to be wary of there.
@mermaid--interesting workaround if I used the cloud plane, but this is inside the sky lab. I'm trying to better understand what all the buttons and gadgets do.
@DavidBrinnen
ok, that will be great. I will go over my steps tomorrow-I did reproduce it a couple of times, and the sky presets still have H's. The funny thing is I did not use the IBL only the other sky tabs, so I did not add any HDRI. I will add some screen captures. But, you may be right about it being simply a bug. I was surprised I could work at all in the DTE without a crash, but I finally got a crash when I fidgeted with something. The noise filter is an alien thing to me. I've seen an oscilloscope, but I never understood it beyond the basics of wide/narrow-deep/high trough and crest. Trying to find it was the first hurdle! I got the slim pocket menu, but didnt know the green corner was the key until tonight. Then fooling around with it is like doing sumi-e painting in the dark with a butter knife. I'm burned out with it tonight. But I am determined to learn it!
oh, i've read somewhere in the bryce forums about the cache history of bryce i guess this is the cause for this bug.
Here are my old 2 screenshots about this bug:
In the first image i created a "Delirium" sky , i think the using a hdr was selected in sky lab but no hdr files activated.
In the second image , later , i have a "ghost" category, destroyed of course by the bsk bug.
The weird thing on the end it was that subcategory file (400mb) - containing 4 bugged .bsk saved (each 100mb) , was still present on my computer by the bryce can't see it anymore , so i had to delete it ..lucky me, was only random generated skies.
Compare first image with the second one and see how many skies are(were) saved in Random Skies ..not to many for a 400 mb file :lol:
Anyways i learnt a lesson : not to save .bsk skies presets with hdr checked in sky lab :lol: its safer to save a scene if i have an advanced sky with sky slab too .
and thank you David for your fast reply to help us with tips .:) - i guess the merging objects,skies,mats into 1 specific file in bryce was a bad idea :lol: ? or they didn't expected to find the bsk bug.
Edit: Thank you Horo for your reply and confirmation about this bsk saving and the hdr, i thought only me found it and today IceScribe.About that H ,first time i thought its from your name ,meaning there is some settings belonging to Horo when creating a sky :lol:
@cris333 - I'm a bit late to the party. That H in the skylab ought to indicate that there is an HDRI included in the sky. It does so sometimes as well if no HDRI is attached. This is a bug and it was reported at the time.
For any library, there is the 2 GB file size limit. If it grows larger, all is destroyed. Deleting from a library doesn't free the space, the item is just flagged as deleted and will not show. It still occupied all the space.
The oscilloscope representation in the DTE is a bit off. In fact, the DTE is a synthesizer and we would need a spectrum representation, that is, in the frequency domain, not in the time domain as the oscilloscope is.
I'm also trying to find my way round Bryce, so far I had no real success with landscapes, except those following David's Tuts
@ David or Horo- Does the 2Gb file limitation refer to each library eg. 2Gb for the skies, and 2Gg for materials or a sum total of all.
2gb per category.
I've marked what counts as a category in each case.
Thanks David, it's nice to know these things although I will never exceed 2gb in any category.:)
Apologies for not getting screen shots up. It's a long story. Our printer quit. Then, my DAZ content "disappeared" but has been reappearing. I tried out a few choices from the content menu. Many are still empty, but some have choices, like DAZ People, which I need of course. So satisfied with that, I tried my PSP program, which has screen capture, it just would not work. Then I tried One Note, which worked but now I need to migrate the screen clippings to the paint program. So I decided to take digital photo, which would actually take less editing. My camera had 125 photos, so I uploaded those to clear out the memory to start fresh. I found some interesting shots and began testing some photo manipulation. Got tired. Next day, I had yet another dental appointment, thankfully very little probing and poking with the sharp metal thing, but the dentist did remove a chip, which was such a relief, like a tiny piece of glass in the foot. You can live with it, but sometimes a little pressure hurts like the devil. Feeling so relieved when I got home, I opened Bryce fully intending to get to serious work, but opened a different scene I had been working in because an "AHA" came to me on how to fix the model. I've had that model for a couple of years but it had weird "shadows" and nobody could help with it. Turns out, exported to Bryce, I saw the interior wall had skewed a few degrees and was jutting just outside the exterior wall, so it looked like a shadow. I typed 000 in the axes, for the interior walls, and presto! A useable model. So I spent some more time on that, tweaking and testing... and now it's another day.
Just to get the show going, I want to mention that I checked my presets. I don't have 2 GB of anything in any category. All KBs. I did not save more than a few skies and I did not select any HDRI options. I'm pretty old school, and conservative, when 2GB was the entire memory of a brand new computer! I read somewhere that saving presets added to memory, but could only be deleted from the menu, not the memory. So I try to keep that in mind. I have skies presets that I bought but I haven't loaded because of that. I also avoided the volumentrics, both for memory and for rendering time. I don't want to burn out this hard drive for a while!
Now, it seems possible that the Random sky generator may have randomly used an HDRI factor in its calculations, but I don't see any HDRI factors in the IBL screen for a preset with an H in the thumbnail. That may be part of the bug Horo refers to. It tried to use HDRI, but since it's not selected or stipulated in the IBL menu-- so my sky preset disappears, exactly because of that. This sort of makes sense to me. What do you all think?
Here is a single image of the screen shots for the sky preset I made. To recap, the problem was that the stratus only cloud that I edited from the cloud tab edit to DTE did not save with the rest of the sky. Only the moon and stars were saved. The stars were set at "custom" to get recognizeable constellations. I could see Orion and the Pleides in the original, but the stars seem to have reverted to random or shifted from my camera. I expected to do postwork to brighten moon/stars. (Note, cropping and compression have distorted the screen shot).
The main problem is that I had gone into the Cloud editor, selected Stratus only, and edited that successfully in the DTE (meaning it didnt crash and I returned to the Cloud tab with the edited image in the little box). I show the expected general area with drawn lines on the screen shot. I wanted the moon and some stars to peep through. After saving it, The letter H appeared in the thumbnail. As shown, I did this 3 times with identical results.
But this also happened with the Randomizer, with completely different cloud and atmosphere settings and again, no HDRI in the IBL settings. If this is a bug, I can live with it. I used Mermaid's suggestion of cloud plane and that seemed to be ok. Maybe a better method, since I can shift the cloud plane to get the moon and stars.
So far as I know the Random sky generator is not in any way aware of IBL. So that should not be the source of the problem. What may be is some kind of legacy material that is getting into the sky presets...
But first I will test your steps and see if I get anything similarly fishy.
So my steps.
1. launched Bryce.
2. go into sky lab > clouds cover tab
3. edit Stratus.
4. exit sky lab.
5. add sky to library (also tested adding the sky from within the sky lab - with same result).
No H for me.
So, to get to the bottom of this issue, can you confirm that if you follow these same steps you get an H? Or if not, update my steps to include steps that do result in a H being added to the thumb.
My system info
Windows 7 Pro
64 bit OS
Intel i7 CPU
6 Gb memory
HD 5850 GPU
here is my computer info
Win 7 64 bit OS
IntelCore i5 CPU
8 GB RAM
I didnt know what the last item was. (I always have someone help me buy and set up my computer-I just drive it)
Ok, your steps were similiar. I did choose Celestial Starfield 'custom' and show the moon before editing the cloud.
Where I differed was in the editing of the cloud in the DTE I selected a different texture called HiStratus2
and then used the Noise editor with the bead in cup 1d, and then I shifted around the direction for more diagonal to horizontal streaks, and the frequency lowered in the hopes of having empty areas for the moon to shine through. You are right, this was saved, and did not produce an H thumbnail. And after that I used the Randomizer.
What I did was use my edited sky preset, which I saved in a new folder instead of the Installed or User. I was able to re-load and render.
Between 4 and 8 tries on that preset with the Randomizer beadstrand, I finally achieved a sky which in the preset menu that when I was saving it, showed an H thumbnail.
Now this H preset I was able to save, but I had also saved it as a Bryce scene. I wonder if that is necessary to make it stick. I mean, not only saving in the preset menu but also the document. Because I exported the sky to a different folder, and then imported again. The thumbnail inserted itself into the menu in the category I had opened which happened to be Backgrounds, and had an H. It loaded as it had been created. I opened my new folder TestSkies, and it did the same, upon import. None of the H thumbnail presets had any HDRI settings set, nor contained any after loading.
The odd thing is when I checked the folder properties of my new category it has 4 saved presets, but shows 0 data in the properties.
On a slightly different note, Am I correct in assuming that a separate folder of sky presets -separate from Installed and User, can actually be deleted as opposed to only the thumbnail in a preset menu being deleted but not the actual file?
It sounds to me like the bug is somewhat random from what you are saying. Which makes it very difficult to replicate or fix. Since I take it you've not been able to identify a distinct series of steps that from launch will lead to the production of a faulty sky?
For me crashes occur modifying the clouds in the editor - but that's a different issue and doesn't seem to relate to what you are experiencing.
The last item on my system specification was a graphics card.
And this document Bryce Content PDF by Horo explains the roles of the content folders.
I think I have figured out how the H thumbnail occurs. Using Panorama in Document setup.
It took me a while to retrace my steps, so I did not present them as steps in my earlier post as I did not remember exactly.
Today I could not generate an H thumbnail. My document settings were
Letter size 1200x600 aspect ratio 2:1 constrain proportions
Anti-aliasing on superfine
Finally, tonight I remembered that the tutorial I had started from at the beginning had the document set at Panorama
so I did that right now,
Panorama 1200x450 aspect ration 8:3 constrain proportions
Anti-aliasing on superfine
First H thumbnail in first render and save to sky preset menu. All randomized skies from that preset produce H type thumbnails.
The change in the ratio changed the position of the Moon-I had not adjusted for that, so when I rendered a sky in my default Letter document, it was not where I expected.
As for the clouds, the Randomizer added Cumulus data, but kept my edited stratus.
So far, seems repeatable with the Panorama document setup.
Well done! Yes it worked for me straight away. So that is very important news for avoiding this bug. Don't use any of the preset document aspect ratio's on the right hand side. Put your own aspect ratio and select your own resolution and you will be fine. I suppose this bug wasn't picked up because most beta testers and us on the steering committee will be familiar with Bryce and not think to use this legacy menu - most of the options of which are outdated.
This bug you have encountered, I remember now we saw before, at the very instigation of HDRI - as it affected standard saving of skies. I didn't know though that it was due to the document setup - I'd always thought it was due to the way the sky files were saved. So this is interesting news. This also explains why it is possible to pass on this "infection" from earlier versions of Bryce. I suppose some of the saved skies in the library will be the same and should be handled with caution.
Thank you for sticking with this and finding out what is going on. Now we know, it will help others who run into this issue. And if a bug fix round occurs then I will get this written up for the Bugtracker and we can see about getting it put right.
On a different note.
I would also recommend avoiding Superfine AA. It is the slowest render mode for AA and offers the least amount of control over this operation. Either use Standard rendering and modify the AA settings in render options to suit your scene or Premium rendering and take advantage of more effects while Bryce slogs through the over sampling.
@IceScribe - thanks for that. I had reported the bug at the time, then it went away with one of the builds. Obviously, it came back differently - or I tested with the wrong aspect ratio. This is a very good finding. Bugs that can be repeated can also be remedied. Thank you again for your persistence.
Well done! Yes it worked for me straight away. So that is very important news for avoiding this bug. Don't use any of the preset document aspect ratio's on the right hand side. Put your own aspect ratio and select your own resolution and you will be fine. I suppose this bug wasn't picked up because most beta testers and us on the steering committee will be familiar with Bryce and not think to use this legacy menu - most of the options of which are outdated.
This bug you have encountered, I remember now we saw before, at the very instigation of HDRI - as it affected standard saving of skies. I didn't know though that it was due to the document setup - I'd always thought it was due to the way the sky files were saved. So this is interesting news. This also explains why it is possible to pass on this "infection" from earlier versions of Bryce. I suppose some of the saved skies in the library will be the same and should be handled with caution.
Thank you for sticking with this and finding out what is going on. Now we know, it will help others who run into this issue. And if a bug fix round occurs then I will get this written up for the Bugtracker and we can see about getting it put right.
On a different note.
I would also recommend avoiding Superfine AA. It is the slowest render mode for AA and offers the least amount of control over this operation. Either use Standard rendering and modify the AA settings in render options to suit your scene or Premium rendering and take advantage of more effects while Bryce slogs through the over sampling.
I was wondering something, this bug that seems to be connected to using the preset sizes in document setup, could it cause wierd things to happen with other things besides skies, such as lighting? I ask because I have a bad habit of using the max recommended option (I like to make things big to keep it easier on my eyes) and at times I get what seems to be wierd things happening when I use IBL and HDRI's. Now it may just be my incompetence and I forget to set something that causes my issue but there have been times where I was fairly certain I did things right and still got wierd results. Unfortunately I can't duplicate any of it because more often then not I'm just messing around with an idea that popped into my head and I don't keep a record as I go of what I've done.
@Horo
@DavidBrinnen
I am glad to have been able to help identify this bug. All Brycers should keep this in mind when looking at old-version Bryce tutorials on the web and trying them out.
And with regard to using superfine--I usually avoid that and use regular for my renderings, and very rarely fine. I was just trying hard to find out what was behind the bug, and remembered that was one of the settings the tutorial mentioned. I do not remember where the tutorial was, or who wrote it, but if I come across it again, I will post it so you can see how the old version criteria were used.
I was wondering something, this bug that seems to be connected to using the preset sizes in document setup, could it cause wierd things to happen with other things besides skies, such as lighting? I ask because I have a bad habit of using the max recommended option (I like to make things big to keep it easier on my eyes) and at times I get what seems to be wierd things happening when I use IBL and HDRI's. Now it may just be my incompetence and I forget to set something that causes my issue but there have been times where I was fairly certain I did things right and still got wierd results. Unfortunately I can't duplicate any of it because more often then not I'm just messing around with an idea that popped into my head and I don't keep a record as I go of what I've done.
It is not beyond the realms of possibility. Any legacy component that interacts with a new component that is outside the steps anticipated by the programmers might be capable of introducing a bug. Which is what appears to have happened with the preset document setups. I would not have expected document setup to be responsible for initialising any sky settings, but that is what appears to have happened. Again though, if you consider that using the "reset sky" option does not revert the sky to the launch default state but some legacy state where the global shadow intensity is set to 90% not 100% that suggest that a global default launch state does not exist to be addressed through the various means of resetting the sky. Which might account for the problem in this case. This is bound to be an inherent problem for any software that is passed from one programming team to another - overarching schemes tend to be lost and each team must feel their way through the morass of code from scratch.
OK Now this has just happened to me. Out of the blue.
The first sky is one I used in Br5, opened the image with it in, saved the sky into sky presets in Br 7. No problem.
Edited only colour setting, saved it again, got an H. Removed the sky dpme from the image ( even though that was transparent anyway, as I had meant to remove it once I had a decent sky going on.. Saved it again, still showing an H
Closed bryce, Reopened bryce, tried saving it again, and there it is once more.
This is not an HDRI, is a sky dome that was part of the obj I imported into Bryce.
Well, it seems to be an issue with legacy skies. Have to be chalked down for a bug fix. I can think of a work around but I need a sky to test it on - I'd do it on one I'd artificially made but that would not be a good test. Post me a "faulty" sky file and I'll see if I can fix it for you.
Pam... you sent me a post. Which is nice, but I think you forgot to attach the files. To be fair if you'd just sent the files and omitted the description, I'd probably have been able to make more progress.
oh whoops. I shall have another go.
Hmn... not good news I'm sorry to report. But this possibly explains why Bryce is more prone to crashing for some people and not others. As someone who rarely uses sky presets, I also rarely experience crashes - but never put the two together. However, I tested both your skies and indeed I could scrub out the H but the file did remain invisibly corrupt and repeated testing resulted in repeated crashes. I was initially suspicious of "link to sun" but I found no evidence of that. Also, after using your sky then "new document" and starting out from scratch, Bryce remained unstable - so it was an ongoing "infection". So there's something to be aware of.
Simple fix, the solution is to stop using legacy skies and run out and buy all of your skies and use only those right? :)
The original legacy sky I made and transferred over from Br5 works. It was only when I started tweaking it that it failed., and it only failed on the save. The tweaks work in the new image.
What I had done was open a Br 5 file in Br 7 and then saved the sky into my preset skies in Br7
A set of skies I purchased also have gone into Br7 with no problems, although they were made for an older version.
Interesting, I cannot help. But at a time during a dev cycle, I encountered a sky bug. I removed one part after the other, until nothing was in the scene, not even a sky. The bug was still there. Saving the empty file, quitting Bryce, restarting it and loading the scene and that darn bug was back. No other scene could be made to create that bug. So it must have been some residue of a bug in one of the betas. I had once issues with my default.brx I always copied from one version to the other until the moment a version stalled. Since then, I create my default.brx file anew each time I install a new version.