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Some frames rendering as black
Hi,
I’m a noob to anything 3D. I have a 300 frame animation and the first 93 frames are all rendering as pure black. Every frame after 93 looks great. The animation is a flyover and the landscape I created has a loooot of polygons. The early part of the animation has most of the polygons in frame and the later part zooms in on an area.My computer is an old machine – ’09 macbook pro, 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo.
My questions is: Could the problem be my CPU can’t deal with all the polygons in frame in the early part of the animation? Therefor, it’s just a viewing issue at my end?
Is it likely that if I send it to a render farm it will all be good?
Is there anything I can do to fix this? I’m happy to send the file to anyone to have a look at it. I’m using R17.Cheers, Tarn
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11 Replies
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Do the offending frames render ok in the viewport, but not in your final render?
Post your project file so we can take a look at it. Just drag your C4D file into the reply window and it will be uploaded and posted with your reply.
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Hi Jim,
Thanks for replying. I dragged my file into this reply window so hopefully you can access it. I uploaded 5 frames stepped every 30 to a render farm and, sure enough, the first 4 frames came back black and frame 120 came back fine. So frames 0, 30, 60, 90 were all black. So apparently the problem isn’t just my computer unable to view so many polygons.Let me know if you can uncover anything! ☺
Cheers, Tarn
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Hi,
I have since discovered that it’s the animated water which appears to be the issue. When I delete or switch off the water it renders fine. But, although I can go without the scene of the camera skimming over the water, it would still be nice to know if there’s a way to make it work. Don’t know if this info helps at all!? -
Hi Tarn,
Yes, I found the same anomaly before seeing your response here. I found that disabling the transparency channel in the water material allows it to render okay. Why? I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out.
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I haven’t a clue as to why frame 94 and up will render fine with the water material’s transparency enabled, but 93 and below will not. I don’t have Arnold, or the rust materials you are using for the other objects, but as far as the rest of the scene is concerned (including the little bit of water seen in the background) frame 93 with transparency off and frame 94 with transparency on look identical when rendered. Very odd.
Hopefully the look of the water with transparency off will be ok for you as the camera first flies over it. I have only rendered stills, so you’ll need to render out your image sequences to decide.
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Hi Jim,
That’s some good sleuthing! Sure enough, I just disabled the transparency and it seems to be rendering OK (so far).
I don’t know yet what effect this will have on the water’s appearance. Maybe it’ll look rubbish or maybe I can getaway with it.
If you do discover why the transparency is causing this grief please let me know. Until then I’ll see how this looks.Thanks heaps for your detective work ☺
Cheers, Tarn
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Glad to help. Good luck with the project.
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Thanks for any input.
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it’s the Absorption Distance which is calculated on a volume (usually) but a one dimensional disk is being used so it breaks, total internal reflection also doesn’t make sense but doesn’t break it. It works if you replace the disk with a cylinder (though with the camera that low to the water it probably doesn’t matter and just set Absorption Distance to 0.
edit– it may depend on the direction the camera is pointing. if you increase the Absorption Distance to 10000 you get a render (even 1000) perhaps with an object with no thickness Absorption Distance is above if the camera points up. With that scale of scene Absorption Distance of 100 is incredibly small, since this is close to real world scale AD should be 100 – 200 meters(-ish I’m guessing) not 100 cm -
Thanks Brian. Hopefully Tarn can put that info to use.
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