I am really hoping someone can help me with this… I’ve spent a few weeks struggling to diagnose what’s going on, but despite noticing a few odd things about the problem, I still have no clue why it’s happening or how to stop it. Googling only shows that other people have had similar problems that were resolved much more easily than mine.
The story is: I recently transferred all of my files, including Blender files, to a new laptop which has a worse graphics card (not sure if this is related). I have one Blender file that I created on my old computer and rendered several times with no problems at all. But on the new computer, there is some really weird degeneration issue that appears after rendering it from certain angles. Here is an example of the issue I am facing. All I have been able to figure out is this:
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The direction the model is facing seems to make the most difference! I have it set up so that the head is “animated” and rotates to face a different direction on each frame… left, right, front and back. If I just render the side and back views, I can render seemingly however many I want without encountering any problems. But as soon as I render the model from the front, it will look half-black, and any render I make after that will have the UV blackness issue, no matter which direction it’s facing.
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I am using Blender 2.43. This is the same version I used on my old computer, so I don’t think the version should be an issue. [SUP]I know it’s an older version and, yes, I do have valid reasons as to why I haven’t upgraded.[/SUP]
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This issue is specifically connected to the UV mapped components. Non-UV mapped bits, like the eyes, always look okay. If the UV mapped materials turn black, and then I turn off TexFace for one of them so that it isn’t displaying its UV texture, it will be illuminated normally. As soon as I turn TexFace back on, it will be solid black again.
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My first concern was that the texture file might have gotten corrupted, but I can swap it out for a completely different image to no effect. Rendering from the front will make it black no matter what image I use. If the model already looked black, changing the image will not undo the blackness.
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I have rendered other UV mapped models in different files and they don’t turn black. So far, it looks like this issue only affects the variations of this one model.
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It doesn’t seem to be an issue with the complexity of the model, in terms of the number of faces in the model. I have rendered both simpler and more complex UV mapped models on this computer and they did not turn black.
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It doesn’t appear to be an issue with the size of the image. I have other models that use textures with the same filesize, or larger, and they don’t do this.
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I have around four slightly different copies of the same Blender file, with the same models. All of the copies were made on the old computer at various points in time before being transferred to the new one, and on the old computer, none of them displayed any kind of issue like this. They all display this issue when I try to render them on the new computer. So it doesn’t seem that the Blender file got corrupted in the move or something… it would have had to corrupt four separate files in different folders, without harming anything else around them.
The only thing I can think is that maybe rendering from the front, which displays the most surface area because of the eyes and everything, makes it “poop out” halfway through and after that it just can’t handle the UVs anymore. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it’s the only thing I can think of that fits what I’m seeing. This new computer is cheaper than my the old one, so if it’s something like the graphics card/memory getting overwhelmed… well, I got what I paid for, I guess.
Short of that, I can only conclude that this model is cursed. :spin:
In all seriousness, though, I’m really hoping someone will know how I can stop this issue, or at least work around it.
