Render produces empty png
TheMageWilliam
Posts: 65
I just spent a few hours creating a scene and for some reason when I render it I end up with an empty, essentially transparent png.
I tried shutting down and restarting. Then I rebooted.
I pulled up an image I rendered on Saturday. This one was only of one person so it took 2 minutes to render. The Iray preview didn't seem to want to render the scene, so I shut it down and reinstalled the driver to see if that would fix things. I reopened Daz, and it opened up the preview, but would only render if I was in the new filament preview. I pulled up another scene that is related to the one I was working on, and it came up black, again unless I had the filament preview up, then it rendered fine.
I deleted a bunch of stuff out of the scene, put a character into the scene that I put into the other scene, and did a test render, and once again it was all black.
I shut down, restarted, and then it seemed like it was rendering, but it just made a grey image. That confused me the most.
I tried deleting the character I added and did another render, and again grey.
I don't know if this is a glitch since I updated it to 4.14.0.8.
But I closed out of it, again opened up the image I rendered last Saturday, and it renders fine.
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Comments
Computer specs?, operating system?, GPU? and driver version?
Check if you have canvases activated with nodes that are not existent in your scene.
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit
i-7 6700 4.0 GHz
32 GB ram
GeForce GTX 1080
Studio driver v. 456.71
"Canvases" is not checked
And interestingly now when I switch to the Iray preview it is gray.
And an update, apparently there is a limit to how far I can move the camera. (With strange rules.) I am using Beach Cafe Promenade, and interestingly it placed it far away, which is perfect for what I am trying to do.
I wanted to do an alternate scene, and I was moving the camera to it to place people on it, and just found that it grays out when I go past a certain distance, at least with the keyboard. When I use the Z Translate slider to move it, no problem, but using W on the keyboard turns gray after I pass a certain distance. But that distance changes after I use the Z slider.
Are you sure you haven't moved the camera inside an object in the scene?
When I get that behavior it's because my GPU (PNY GeForce GTX 1650 Super 4GB) has not enough video RAM to render the scene & I've also configured DAZ Studio to not allow fallback to CPU render the scene.
I even tried it without anything in the scene, and it is too high to be under the bottom plane.
Also, as I stated above, if I used the slider to put the camera in the exact same position it wouldn't blank out. But it would if I used the keyboard to move it. And interestingly after moving it with the slider, the keyboard would then kick in with the problem, but the problem moved by about as far as I moved the camera with the slider.
The reason I never caught this before was that I really didn't move the camera when I was in the Iray preview.
Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 w/8 gigs of memory. CPU is turned off. But it has been doing this with practically nothing in the scene and even nothing in the scene.
It is still strange that after this first happened when I opened a test scene I couldn't get the Iray preview to work on a single character. After I reinstalled the driver and reopened Daz it was fine. I also don't know why I have had an empty png, a black png, and a grey png.
When it was getting the empty (transparent) png, and the black png, it finished the render in seconds. Although if it's rendering nothing it shouldn't take long.
When I get empty, black, or grey renders that finish within seconds, it's almost always due to running out of VRAM. 99% of the time, turning on CPU rendering (if it's off) or turning it off (if it's on) resolves it. The 1% of the time that doesn't do the trick, quitting and restarting DS does.
Did you quit and restart DS between render attempts?
When I get empty, black, or grey renders that finish within seconds, it's almost always due to running out of VRAM. 99% of the time, turning on CPU rendering (if it's off) or turning it off (if it's on) resolves it. The 1% of the time that doesn't do the trick, quitting and restarting DS does.
Did you quit and restart DS between render attempts?
When I get empty, black, or grey renders that finish within seconds, it's almost always due to running out of VRAM. 99% of the time, turning on CPU rendering (if it's off) or turning it off (if it's on) resolves it. The 1% of the time that doesn't do the trick, quitting and restarting DS does.
Yes, I have shut down, and rebooted, more than once. That's when it shifted to a black image, and then it shifted to a grey one.
But it looks like my issue is back, but I am not at any extreme location. (Z Translate isn't over 10,000.)
I open Daz and it seemed to take longer to load up the image, but the Iray Preview is running at 21% CPU and 76% GPU. Power usage is listed as very high.
Starting the render, and the CPU seems to drop, and the GPU climbed to 89%, and now I have a black image. The Iray Preview is now monochrome and seems stuck.
I switch to the filament preview, and now it's 8% CPU, and 35% memory. Start the render from here, and the CPU jumps, then settles down to 41% and the GPU is at 79%, but everything is now rendering. 2:45 render. This is telling me that I need to render from filament preview, not Iray.
Now I will try rendering from texture. Again CPU jump, GPU memory at 64%, then moves up to 76% as the CPU drops. 40% CPU with 76% memory from a minute on. 2:58 render. Worked fine.
And now I just shut down Daz Studio, and it is still in memory. 20% CPU, 16% memory, and very high power usage. Took over 2 minutes to clear from the memory.
If you couldn't tell I was doing all this as I was typing. But for some reason, I cannot render if the preview is in Iray. People keep saying it renders faster if you start from the Iray preview. (I always wondered if that took into account the time for the Iray Preview to get up to speed.)
I guess as long as I can get it to work, but this does worry me.
Interesting. Can you link a couple of examples? I've honestly never seen that advice before: in fact, quite the opposite. The advice I've come across is to use iray preview to adjust lighting/exposure/tone mapping, etc. then switch to any mode other than iray preview to render because iray preview will compete for GPU cycles and reduces the amount of VRAM available for the render. The few times I've accidentally started a render with an open iray preview viewport, the render dropped to CPU before it even finished precompiling compiling the geometry.
Multiple videos on YouTube. Would probably take a little searching to find, but give me time and I am sure I will find it.
Anyway, I was wrong about it rendering better from another preview, as I once again got a black image. I then tried turning on the CPU, and I got it to render. But I would prefer to keep it off.
I started delving into the log file, and found what I believed to be my last failed attempt at rendering, and found a lot of warnings of failing to find files. I copied them off and pasted them into a word file, and it is 150 pages long, covering just over 32 seconds.
On a side note, I did grab the most recent driver for my video card that came out Tuesday. Didn't seem to help.
At this point, I am wondering if I might need to reinstall it.
Youtube... [sigh]... What the "people" claim there, does not make sense - You waste valuable resources that are needed in rendering for trivial things like the preview....
There was a theory that using Iray preview the data would already be uploaded to the GPU, and so it would take less time for the render to start. I'm not sure if that's still true, but in any event for most renders the tiem taken to prepare the scene is a very minor part of the whole.
Yes, I go to YouTube. There are different levels of skill there, and some are better than others, and it usually requires sifting through the . I usually try to find more than one until I seem to find someone who knows what they are talking about, or at least seems like they are.
Also "people" in quotes? So they really aren't really people?
Okay sorry, I will get serious.
I do believe the initial render did pop up quicker, but other than that I really wasn't sure it really sped up anything, but I can't say I found any reduction in performance either. I always planned on testing if it really helped, or was a resource hit by timing a few renders, but never really got around to it.
All throughout this issue I haven't really noticed one way or the other.
Okay, I am rendering an image that really hasn't caused me any issues. A single character with an infinity cove behind her, and with Iray in preview it took 1:11 to render. From Filament it took 1:20. From Texture, it took 1:21. Going down to Lit Wireframe, it took 1:23. 1:23 for Solid Bounding box.
Interesting, and I redid the Iray preview while rendering, and got 1:10 that time. But this is only a very short render, and it is possible that there is a performance hit, but a benefit in the short term.
I tried to go back and render the image I had before, but again it will not render. I deleted 4 people out of the scene, and the pier, and yet it still is giving me a black image. (Rendered in 12 seconds.)
Restarted, but out of time, so will finish this post later.