User Tools

Site Tools


faq_knald

FAQ & Troubleshooting

FAQ

How do I contact Knald Technologies?

You can reach us via e-mail at the following addresses:

Or join us on the following social networks/sites:

What are the system requirements for Knald?

Please see the System Requirements page for more information on the minimum and recommended system requirements for Knald.

Troubleshooting


Knald isn’t working correctly. What can I do to fix the issues I am having?

Here are some things you can try that might help you out:

  • Ensure you have a compatible graphics card and that your system meets the minimum requirements. Knald requires an OpenCL compatible GPU. If you are not sure if your card is compatible, you can find a partial list of conformant GPUs here. If your GPU was made after 2008, there is a good chance it is OpenCL compatible.
  • Check that you have the latest drivers for your GPU. Many issues can be resolved by simply installing the latest drivers for your graphics card. You can get the latest Nvidia drivers here and the latest AMD/ATI drivers here.

Driver Issues

Some NVIDIA drivers have been reported to cause problems with OpenCL/OpenGL. Please do not use the following drivers with our software as they are unsupported by us.

Driver Issues

Some NVIDIA drivers have been reported to cause problems with OpenCL/OpenGL. Please do not use the following drivers with our software as they are unsupported by us.

Knald Unsupported Drivers
  • 344.11
  • 344.48
  • 344.60
  • 344.65
  • 344.75
Lys Unsupported Drivers
  • 364.51
  • 364.72
  • 365.10
  • 365.19
  • 368.22

Installing new drivers

On some occasions errors within Knald are due to cached shaders that the driver hasn't compiled correctly or are corrupted in some way. Whenever you install a new driver we always recommend that you perform a clean installation and delete any cached shaders if they are present on your system.

Performing a clean installation of your drivers and deleting shader cache is simple and you can learn how to do it on the Clean Driver Installation page

If you are still having issues, please contact us! You can reach us via e-mail at: support@knaldtech.com

Knald is running slowly/Normal Map is not processing/the 3D Preview Window is blank

In the case of any of these issues, please check the following:

  • The amount of VRAM that your GPU has. The size of the image which Knald can process successfully is limited to the amount of VRAM that it takes to process, so using a very large image (4096² and above) may result in issues. Most modern graphics cards have at least 512MB of VRAM and therefore should be able to process a 2048² texture with ease. If you have more than 1GB of VRAM, you should be able to process a 4096² texture.

Below you will find a rough guide of how much contiguous VRAM is required on a single GPU in order to process the various texture sizes listed1)

  • 512² = 90mb
  • 1024² = 140mb
  • 2048² = 330mb
  • 4096² = 1.2GB
  • 8192² = 3.8GB
  • Running multiple instances of Knald. Due to the amount of GPU VRAM required to process images within Knald, it is currently not recommended to run more than one instance of the program as VRAM may become exhausted. Rebooting your PC may free up stuck resources and can release VRAM which was being used by other applications and/or contended erroneously due to driver and/or application bugs.

There are striations/strange patterns on my Normal map. How can I remove them?

Striations such as these are often due to the bit depth of your source images being too low. As a result of this limited precision, it can be difficult to reproduce variations of angle and slope with acceptable accuracy.

We suggest the following solutions to fix these issues:

  • Use at least 16bit source images wherever possible and then export them at a lower bit depth if necessary.
  • Use the ‘Enable Noise Reduction” option which is found within the Integrator panel in the Main tab. This will not give you identical results to using higher precision images and results in a softer overall image, but is a reasonable solution if using if your images are restricted to 8bit.
  • Toggle the ‘Tileable’ check box in the General group under the Main tab. If a map is set to tilable incorrectly, it may result in errors around the borders of the image.

Why are there are shading artifacts/smoothing errors/seams on my imported mesh in the 3D Preview?

This is a side-effect of Knald applying the integrated height map to your mesh. Sadly, it is not currently possible for Knald to generate perfectly correct values around the UV islands (which are typical if the normal map was baked) resulting in the possibility of minor visual aberrations when applying the exported height maps to UV containing meshes.

1) As SLI/Crossfire and Dual GPUs on a single card do not have contiguous VRAM blocks you will only be able to access half of the advertised amount on such systems.
faq_knald.txt · Last modified: 2017/05/23 03:49 (external edit)