ARRGHH! Lowering Level of Detail causes render discrepency!

[Jeremy Allen]

I have a light which has been cloned and then cloned again into a matrix object to form 2 rows of lights. At some point I went to render and only one row would show up.

I just spent the last 2 hours(!) trying to track down this problem. After pulling out most of my hair and almost redoing my whole project, I started going through all the render settings I had changed one by one, and finally found the problem.. I had lowered the Level of Detail to 75%. I set this back to the default 100%, rendered again, and viola, 2 rows of lights again.

I thought Level of Detail would only lower the quality and save a little render time when testing. For some reason it has affected the way the cloners work.. Anybody else had any issues with this? Am I missing something with regards to the Level of Detail setting?

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Adam Trachtenberg]

It’s working the way it’s designed to work. It’s actually quite useful if you have a seen with thousands of clones (or if you’re cloning heavy objects), as it can make viewport navigation much smoother to lower the clone count.

FYI, in addition to the scene-wide setting, you can use the Display Tag to control viewport LOD if you want to affect some but not all objects.