Solved: Item renders white from a distance in Iray - then in color as I zoom in, w/ no other changes

paulawp (marahzen)

I ran into a weird problem testing some new items I picked up this week. It's happening in this freebie flower, but I think I have seen this before in another flower freebie.

Tiny Plants - House Leeks | Daz 3D

I created a new scene and put a few random plants from this collection into it. I noticed right away in the viewport, which was using NVIDIA Iray, that only the purplish part of flowers was showing - the parts of the plants that are green were displaying as plain white. This is exactly how they rendered in Iray.

I started to compare the surface settings of the purplish parts and the green parts when I noticed by accident that if I zoomed in closer, the green color started to become visible in the viewport, and when rendering. I made no other changes - just zoomed in on the object. It was a faint green at first, but the closer I get to the object, the more vibrant the green color gets.

I've only been using Daz for a few months, but I have never seen objects render white unless you're zoomed in close on them. I expect lack of detail - but not total lack of color - from a view of, say, a few feet away. Ideas? I've had no other weird problems in an evening of testing new random things.

 

margrave

Could be the matte fog, in the Environment tab, has some absurdly high value by accident.

paulawp (marahzen)

I checked and confirmed that Matte Fog is Off at present.

Here are some screen shots with two objects from this set. One is basically all green and the other is purplish. From a moderate distance, with viewport using NVIDIA Iray, the purplish one is ... purplish. However, the one that will be green is white. So for the second screen, I've zoomed in significantly - still pretty much the green one is white. Finally, when I zoom really close, the green one is finally, suddenly, green. I made no changes to any setting in these three screen shots - just zoomed in.

If I use Texture Shaded, the green plant remains green at all these distances, so I guess it must be an Iray thing; the fact that rendering in Iray reflects this view also suggests that. (eg, if I render these three, the third one shows the bright green color, but the first two show that same plant as a flat white.) However, I haven't seen anything but the green color in these plants do it, and I've tested a lot of random products recently.

Weird, huh?

margrave

It isn't pure white; the second image shows it's just overblown.

Try applying a random shader to it and see if the issue persists. That way, we can at least narrow down if it's an issue with the materials.

paulawp (marahzen)

Yeah, if I apply random shaders to it, I can see the color from a distance like normal, and they render as expected. There must be something specifically weird about the green surface of these plants as they come. I'm not going to stress myself over a free plant - I'll just make a mental sticky note to twiddle with the surface when I decide to use one of these in something. 

They're kind of fun rendered in glass or metal.

margrave

paulawp (marahzen) said:

Yeah, if I apply random shaders to it, I can see the color from a distance like normal, and they render as expected. There must be something specifically weird about the green surface of these plants as they come. I'm not going to stress myself over a free plant - I'll just make a mental sticky note to twiddle with the surface when I decide to use one of these in something. 

They're kind of fun rendered in glass or metal.

Probably an issue with the Subsurface Scattering or translucency. It might be worth opening a support ticket to get it corrected. 

paulawp (marahzen)

I opened a ticket.If there's an interesting resolution, I'll pass it on.

Fishtales

Looks like your light is too bright. I have rendered them in Sun and Sky Only and with my default portrait HDRI and the three or four I tried worked fine.

paulawp (marahzen)

Interesting. I have confirmed that using Sun-Sky, or some light sets, will result in this object showing in the NVIDIA viewport and render. I don't really understand why - the problem is virtually unique to this plant set, particularly the green plants - but if I see that behavior again, I'll know what to do. 

I would ordinarily use a more formal lighting if I were working on something more seriously, but I was simply running through a list of newly obtained things, confirming that they worked with really basic load/test/renders. Thanks for your comments.