preview window jerky when camera is moved

[otakar]

I've just had this happen to me on two different computers. When working in a scene, the preview window got very jerky when moving the camera (even when paused) and a phantom solid sphere appears in my crop render (even at higher quality settings). No imported objects, just a layer masked with a painted shader in one instance, image map based mask in another scene. What could be going on?

[dandelO]

The painted shader can bug out the UI if there are lots of strokes used for your mask. I'll bet the .tgd file is rather larger than another regular one without a painted shader as well? Try disabling the painted shader and retest a render. Not sure about the phantom sphere? Is it possibly a major sized AA bloomed area of the render? I think that blooms only reach 4px to each side of the pixel they're blooming but, if there's a large area of luminosity/brightness it might appear as a larger area. Does the 'sphere' thing appear in the GI prepass?

Try to use as little brush strokes as is possible with the painted shader, lots of strokes makes it really slow, maybe if you need to, paint out the mask and then do a top down render of the mask(in simple black and white) and then import the B+W render to use as the blend shader in an image map shader.

[otakar]

DandelO,

thanks for the suggestions. Getting rid of the painted shader does not help. The painted shader is a simple one stroke with a low flow value (0.08125). Here is the crop render. There is NOTHING between the camera and the surface. I also did a render with GI sample prepass checked as suggested and the results are the same.

Update: I found the camera to be at some crazy coordinates all of a sudden. I was to able to reproduce the problem.

1. Select Top view as the View camera.
2. Zoom in (by a large magnitude)
3. Click "copy this view to the current render camera"
4. Check out the camera coordinates. They are way out in space.
5. Manually changing the coordinates back to some more reasonable coords makes the problem go away.

I suspect it's got nothing to do with the painted shader.

[dandelO]

Odd. So, what is the sphere object, your main planet? I'm confused.

I've never used the other built in virtual camera views in TG for anything, in my experience they rarely fit into anything other than a miles-away view of the x=0 y=0 z=0 origin point.(unless I'm not using them correctly).
Other programs I have, like Vue or Carrara will fit the selected target object into the different virtual camera views upon selection. Even when I've tried 'centre on selected object'(or whatever the TG equivalent is, can't remember) it always seems to be a miles-out view of the object that needs rescaling manually, so I've kind of just forgotten about using those parameters in TG at all.

Weird that if the texture is planned to your planet already, that a new object seems to appear from nowhere. I thought it was maybe just a bloomed area that looked circular that you were explaining it earlier, sorry. I've no idea.

[otakar]

No problem, thanks for responding. As I said, I can get around it by ignoring the built in cameras, but it sure seems like a bug to me. It's not always fun to have to move the camera all over just to get close to something. And if it's a one time need, creating a new camera is kind of an overkill, so I thought I'd just utilize the built in ones, but I am going to stay away now...