AO Stopped Working??

Ostadan

uberenvironment2 has stopped doing ambient occlusion. There is no difference between selecting 'ambient (no ray tracing)' and selecting 'Occlusion'; both render quickly, with no darkening in corners; and reducing the occlusion samples to '2' does not produce the familiar blotchiness.

Advanced Ambient Light seems to be behaving the same way.

I uninstalled and reinstalled DS4 (which is 4.6.2.118 64-bit for Mac), and the default shaders and lights; no improvement.

What could I possibly have broken (never mind how), and how can I fix it?

patience55

shot in the dark ... reboot the computer?

Richard Haseltine

If a reboot didn't help, check that you are using 3Delight to render (quality slider in Render Settings all the way to the top) and that there are no errors in the log (Help>Troubleshooting>View Log after rendering, then scroll to the end).

Ostadan

No luck from reboot, and I'm definitely in 3Delight. The log file doesn't show anything unusual (there is a message griping about using directed shadows with an unmapped color, but that's normal). Non-environmental lights still work fine. I'm kind of flabbergasted; I cannot imagine what piece could be broken. I may try to delete (temporarily rename) the 'Application Support/DAZ 3D' folder and see if something re-initializes properly. Ditto for Preferences/com.DAZ.Studio4.plist

Open to more suggestions. It will probably turn out to be something stupid and simple.

millighost

Things that also affect occlusion:
- Max raytrace depth (in rendersettings)
- Visibility to Raytrace (a setting that can be enabled/disabled) in the occluding surfaces (depending on the shader).

Ostadan

Well, it was repaired by 'restore default settings' in the Render Settings. Weird. I seem to have a particular scene that is corrupting this. Anyway, mischief managed, and thanks for the suggestions.