Black frames output when rendering sequence

[digitalis99]

This is a weird one, and just started happening on my machine.  When rendering a sequence, random frames will be completely black.  I ran a render throughout last night consisting of 300 frames.  About 30-40 of those frames were just completely black when I got up this morning.  They were there, the right dimensions and format, and named correctly...just completely black.

Where do I even start?  There were no errors or warnings.  Attached is the .tgd that I was rendering.

[Tangled-Universe]

Which framenumbers are black and are those same frames always black or just this particular time?
Took a swift look and didn't see anything out of the ordinary so quickly. Need to think about it, but it would be useful if you could help out on those 2 questions.

Cheers,
Martin

[digitalis99]

That's part of the problem.  A scattered selection of frames were black in the first run I did, but only about 3-4%.  In the second run, a different selection of frames were black with the percentage being much higher.  As you can see from the .tgd, this is just a static camera test of my animated waves method.  Nothing going on but two moving PF's.  Based on the last two sequence runs, it appears the black frames are output entirely at random.

[digitalis99]

Just to illustrate what's happening, I tried my .tgd on a different render node than my personal workstation.  On two consecutive runs of the same sequence, it output a totally different set of black frames.


[attach=#]

[Tangled-Universe]

Ehhhh...that's really weird man.
I'll have a look at it then and render 50 frames myself.

FYI, you can reduce GI from 2/2/8 to 1/3/8 and set water transparency to 0 to greatly reduce rendertimes while testing.
Makes things less tedious and time-consuming.

Cheers,
Martin

[digitalis99]

I ran this same .tgd, with no changes to it whatsoever, last night on my workstation.  This time it rendered every frame correctly.   

I must have accidentally added the "respond to solar flare" blue node to my network.

[Oshyan]

I'm 130 frames into rendering this and no black frames thus far. Odd indeed. So far it seems almost like a system-specific issue, which would be very strange, something I don't think we've seen yet.

- Oshyan

[jo]

Hi,

When I tried rendering it with the debug version I got a debug error on the first frame. Not sure what is up with that, will need to refer it to Matt.

Regards,

Jo

[digitalis99]

I'm 130 frames into rendering this and no black frames thus far. Odd indeed. So far it seems almost like a system-specific issue, which would be very strange, something I don't think we've seen yet.

- Oshyan

If it's system-specific, both my workstation and one of the machines in my render farm exhibited the same symptoms.  Now...they don't.   

[DannyG]

This same issue is happening to me on a single frame, Example I am using the NWDA public default project, @ the scenes set camera position, it renders clean, as soon as I move the camera I copy current view to camera, and the image will render black, (I am not under the terrain or anything like that) this happens from time to time on my machine with other projects as well. What I have done in the past is copy the entire project as a clip and insert it without the cameras and renderers & I use the existing cameras etc in the new tgd, this seems to work, this doesn't work inserting new cameras into the original tgd, obviously this is a pain in the @ss, last thing I tried was uninstalled and re installed of tg hoping its some sort of bug, nope same deal. Any clue whats going on here ?

Clean render default camera position

[DannyG]

This same issue is happening to me on a single frame, Example I am using the NWDA public default project, @ the scenes set camera position, it renders clean, as soon as I move the camera I copy current view to camera, and the image will render black, (I am not under the terrain or anything like that) this happens from time to time on my machine with other projects as well. What I have done in the past is copy the entire project as a clip and insert it without the cameras and renderers & I use the existing cameras etc in the new tgd, this seems to more, but obviously this is a pain in the @ss and doesn't work all the time, OK so next I uninstalled and reinstalled, same deal. Any clue whats going on here ?

Same file Camera moved, error in the render

[jo]

Hi Danny,

Please email me the project file saved at the point you get the black frame. You can email me at jomeder@planetside.co.uk.

Regards,

Jo

[DannyG]

Thanks just sent it

[Kadri]

Guys is there anything new about this black fame rendering ?
I have a wip scene that has the same problem with GI on .
When i crop render 1/4 of the frame it looks OK but anything bigger(approximate) gets a final black image.
The buckets does look OK as they render but as it finalizes the bucket , it gets black one by one.

Just wanted to know because 2.4 looks near and if this is sorted out or not?

[Oshyan]

I don't know if this was ever reproduced on our end. I'll check with Jo. Having rendered a tremendous number of sequence frames (literally 10s of 1000s), I have a hard time not suspecting the specific scene setup rather than some intermittent bug in TG's sequence output.

- Oshyan