Weird rendering glitch with rendering trees.

[rolland1013]

I'll give that a try on my next render. Do you think that could be one of the causes for the flicker?

[Kevin Kipper]

Now that I see the frames, I'm thinking it's not the GI.  It looks likes a population is not getting loaded for a given frame.  I'll run this by Matt!

[Kevin Kipper]

Neil, one thing that I do see from the logs, is that some render nodes are using Terragen 4.4.67 and others are using Terragen 4.6.31.  For example, frame 80 was rendered in 4.6.31 on the render node Falcon04, while frame 81 was rendered in 4.4.67 on render node WS02.

[rolland1013]

Uh oh, I thought my TD fixed that. I'll make sure we update all nodes on our farm to 4.6.31.

[rolland1013]

I'm not a programmer, so maybe I shouldn't even be asking this question. But in several of the logs I'm noticing this line to text: 

WARNING: Python version for 'Terragen' plugin is not specified! Defaulting to Python 2.

Does TG require a certain version of Python?

[Kevin Kipper]

Terragen doesn't require Python, so that's probably a warning notice from Deadline.

Do the logs you provided above go with the image sequence you made available to us?  We just want to be sure we're comparing the same things.

Also, what if any, are the holdout items in the project?  Are some tree populations being used as holdouts?

[rolland1013]

Yes, the render logs go with the image sequence I sent you.

The only holdout item is the terrain. Which you catch a glimpse of at frame 183.

I just sent you the scene file to the support email. 

[tjvoll]

Hi Kevin, I'm the TD working with rolland1013.  Are there any flags or env vars we can add to provide more verbose logs? 

Thanks,
Tom

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Tom,

No, unfortunately there's no flags or env vars that provide additional detail and information to the log file.

Also, just following up on our request from Friday via our support system, would it be possible for you to render a pass with the trees and ground together; without any holdouts?  Basically, a beauty pass of the trees and ground together.  We don't necessarily need to see the entire sequence.  Ideally, two frames should suffice, where we can see a frame that renders correctly, followed by a frame that has the problem. 

[rolland1013]

Hey Kevin,

I just emailed you a mov of the rendered shot with visible terrain. As you can see, the problem is gone?? Any ideas?

[rolland1013]

I'm running into another type of rendering glitch. I figured I'd add it to this thread instead of starting a new one. I've run into this issue before, but never to this extreme. What is causing the little black squares to pop up? Any suggestions on how to rid my render of them? In the past, when they would show up, they would usually be in only a few frames. I'd simply recue those frames, but there are in most of the frames on this one.

[Matt]

I don't know what would be causing this, but it looks as though there are NaNs in some of the samples which are then spread out over neighbouring pixels.

If I were troubleshooting this I would try to narrow down which parts of the scene are causing it. First I would disable all the populations and any other objects in the scene besides the landscape and sky, and render some frames of that. If the problem remains, then I would try to narrow down which surface layer or shader is responsible. If the problem is gone, then I would introduce some of the other objects to see what's causing it.

If you're willing to share the project with us at support (and all assets it's referencing), then we will look at in detail. We might notice something unusual that we can focus our tests on.