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.
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
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.
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=#]
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
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.
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
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
Quote from: Oshyan on December 13, 2011, 10:31:00 PM
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. :-\
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
Quote from: DannyGordon on February 03, 2012, 10:35:48 AM
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
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
Thanks just sent it
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?
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
I do not know the others but it could be what you say on my end here.
I have some kinda extreme displacements that i am suspicious of .
And now i get this :
[attachimg=#]
Probably nothing major as you say.
Is memory use very high when you get those errors? They look like possible memory problems. You cold also try increased displacement tolerance in the Planet node, potentially.
- Oshyan
No. It is 2.4 gb mostly.
I have 4 gb ram , windows 7 64 bit.
I tried some basic things:
When i click on the " Cameras " button over the 3d preview window and wait nothing happens(no error).
When i click on the " Renderers " button the preview windows does not draw all things alright at the end(similar to the real rendering) and the error comes up.
I tried it with the other buttons and it seems related if the Atmosphere is drawn or not in the preview .
If i trigger a redraw that does not render the atmosphere i get no warning and no problem with the preview.
I bypassed one node tree and it did go away. It is scene specific as we thought :)
But it is interesting that it can so much wrong.
I will try a GI render too. Just to test if it will render OK without that node tree Oshyan.
Frankly, with "only" 4GB of RAM, it still could easily be memory-related at 2.4GB of memory used. Windows 7 typically uses a GB or so just for system files in memory and basic services. Not to mention other things which are very commonly running in the background, not even active applications - Antivirus, Dropbox, iTunes, etc. Check your *free* memory, what does that show? What do you see on your memory use graph, is it peaking?
- Oshyan
With the last iteration of the scene the free part of memory is near 300-400 mb (it was 300 mb nearly the most at rendering ) in the task manager and no drastic peaks.
It steadily goes up mostly .
The render finishes OK with GI .
The preview window is problematic now (with the node tree on) .
It is manageable for me in this state so not much of a problem .
Maybe a basic thing like a fresh start of Windows could help Oshyan ? :)
Will try it a hour or so later .
Hehe, could be. Problems with the 3D preview are usually driver/graphics card related though. Sounds like there might be multiple things going on, hard to say. It's possible memory use did peak and some hasn't been released, or it's now fragmented and having allocation issues. A reboot would fix all that. That could be at the root of multiple different issues such as you're experiencing, and I can't think of any other likely explanation (unless it's just coincidence).
- Oshyan
I think i found the real problem Oshyan.
I looked at the problematic node tree and found that i have "Intersect underlying" checked .
When OFF i get no warning in the preview only with ON.
Ah interesting. I seem to recall some circumstance where that occurs, but I don't remember the details...
- Oshyan
Thanks for the help Oshyan :)
Quote from: Oshyan on April 01, 2012, 01:15:22 AM
You cold also try increased displacement tolerance in the Planet node, potentially.
That would be unrelated. Low displacement tolerance will not cause errors like this (at least not in current versions). If it's too low, the worst that can happen is that the rendered image won't look right, as it misses surfaces that are displaced more than it expects, or leaves gaps in shadows of displaced surfaces.
Matt
Forget to mention that i tried that ( displacement tolerance in the Planet node) too , but the error did not go away then.
Quote from: Oshyan on April 01, 2012, 01:00:27 AM
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
I have a very similar, maybe the same issue within a project.
TG2 does render OK, then a minor change and the rendere result is just black.
Interesting is that the preview as well as the pre-pass are looking OK and even the change made seems to have worked.
And the type of change seems to be un-important: I have changed camera position or surface displacement or colouring or whatever. The result is always the same: black picture...
[edit on]
To be a bit more exact: the result is not always the same, some pictures were rendered. But the black render result shows up and when it does, the change before was whatever it was. So TG2 became a bit "unpredictable"...
And the probability, that this happens, seems to be increasing :'(
[edit off]
So I am really interested in whether there is something like a common reason found for these black renders.
Every time we've seen a "black render" issue, there is a cause in the specific settings of the scene. It's not really a renderer error, from what we've seen. Are you perhaps using extremely small scale values in a Power Fractal (smaller than 1 cm, or 0.1)?
- Oshyan
indeed, I've had a couple of PF's with small scale values (downto 0.001).
After changing this to a min value of 0.01 the scene was rendered normal or with a non-black result.
So thanks for the hint.
Quote from: Oshyan on April 05, 2012, 10:21:48 PM
Every time we've seen a "black render" issue, there is a cause in the specific settings of the scene. It's not really a renderer error, from what we've seen.
Why are you calling small scales in PF's a "specific setting in the scene"?
As long as there is no hint or documentation stating that these values could lead to unexpected render results, they are simply allowed and any unexpected result is an error.
By the way, there was just the opposite stated: use scales in line with the sizes of items.
Now sand has scales below 0.01, even 0.001 won't be right always.
Happy Easter
I never use a scale smaller than 0.005, after having the same problem in the beginning. Anyway, even for extreme close-ups you'd need good glasses to see such fine detail in real life, so it's hardly any use using smaller scales.