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PI 3.02 crashing, mis-rendering alphas
Hi, Have been using PI for about 3 years now. It’s a great program, useful for all sorts of things. I’ve just updated to V3.02.
I have a commission for doing a series of explosions and effects. They are simple explosions and smoke effects, rendered to .png format. The files are all done, I just need to render. Some of the ip3 files render fine. Some of them are ‘problem files’ which seem to have the following issues:
1) Alpha channels aren’t rendering correctly: the files render out, and the RGB is visible, but the alpha is ‘sheared’ like it’s been stretched diagonally, and no longer aligning w/ the RGB. It looks like tiger stripes. This happens w/ .png and .tga files. Have been trying turning off every possible feature, but it still seems to happen.
2) Program hangs, or just suddenly crashes AFTER render. Either way, the program does not recover after a render. If it suddenly crashes, it happens when switching to another window, such as explorer.
If you would like, I can email an example file, or post examples of what is happening. Any help much appreciated! If I can’t finish this project I’m going to lose this commission and earn the ire of the art director! Not good!
I have a Geforce 7800 GTX graphics card, with drivers updated just a few days ago. Performance is very fast, even w/ motion blur cranked way up, or on large files. I’m running Windows XP, media center edition, SP 2.
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2 Replies
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Quick fix for making deadline: You can “downgrade” to 3.0.1a using the 3.0.1a files on our downloads page.
[pixelpusher] “1) Alpha channels aren’t rendering correctly: the files render out, and the RGB is visible, but the alpha is ‘sheared’ like it’s been stretched diagonally, and no longer aligning w/ the RGB. It looks like tiger stripes. This happens w/ .png and .tga files. Have been trying turning off every possible feature, but it still seems to happen.”
What is the output size you’re creating?
Does this happen with pIRender too? (You can force pIRender to be used by ctrl-clicking the “Save Output” toolbar button.)
Have you tried rendering the same project to AVI (using a codec like Lagarith or Huffy UV that supports alpha)?
[pixelpusher] “2) Program hangs, or just suddenly crashes AFTER render. Either way, the program does not recover after a render. If it suddenly crashes, it happens when switching to another window, such as explorer.”
That’s a weird one. Probably OpenGL driver-related. Did these problems happen before the driver updates?
If those new drivers you’re using are beta drivers, go back to the latest drivers that are non-beta and see if that helps. Also, are you getting the drivers directly from NVidia’s site? If not, try those.
Alan.
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>>What is the output size you’re creating?
Small: typically 125×125.
>>Does this happen with pIRender too?
Sadly, yes.
>>(You can force pIRender to be used by ctrl-clicking the “Save Output” toolbar button.)
Cool trick! Is a similar easy way to queue them up? (btw: I wish that the queue was more of a spreadsheet than a single line entry. Is hard to read now.)
>>Have you tried rendering the same project to AVI (using a codec like Lagarith or Huffy UV that supports alpha)?
I am able to render to avi OK, but have not tried alpha-using codecs. Will try and report.
>>That’s a weird one. Probably OpenGL driver-related. Did these problems happen before the driver updates?
Yes, I updated the drivers because I was having this problem. But it’s hard to say: I wasn’t doing much rendering output to png then, just avi proofs. It did happen a few times, but I just tried agian and it was fine, as I recall.
However, the problem seems to be file-related. Certain ip3 files just won’t render right. Unfortunately at this point it’s more than half of my files, apparently. (Again, I can email these if that would help.)
>>If those new drivers you’re using are beta drivers, go back to the latest drivers that are non-beta and see if that helps. Also, are you getting the drivers directly from NVidia’s site?
Yes, they’re the most recent full non-beta drivers direct from NVidia.
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