High-Poly Cycles Render

I’ve been playing around in Blender with the Cycles engine, and I’ve got a test scene with a ship that I’d like to render. The only problem is that when I do go to render a still, it comes out as just a black frame. At first I thought it was one of my GPU’s, but I got the same results from a CPU render. What does work is rendering a single cube in Cycles. I have not tested the lowest amount of polygons I can render currently, because I want to render these polygons. So far, I’ve tried:

  • Rendering with only 1 GPU
  • Installing the most recent Cuda Toolkit
  • Rendering a jpg still instead of a png
  • Using the “Experimental” Feature Set
  • Decreasing the compression/quality of the still render

Most people in other threads recommend rendering with the CPU in my situation, but like I said before, that yields the same results. I’ve attached the .blend to my post to aid anyone in helping me. Thanks! http://blenderartists.org/forum/images/icons/icon10.png

Attachments

testship.blend (2.73 MB)

You did not pack the textures into the file…
However, the reason why your image turns black after rendering is your compositing setup: The Composite node, which is kind of the output node for the entire compositing node network, isn’t connected to anything. Because it gets no input, it outputs just black.

In Blender you have essentially three “steps” that contribute to the final image:

  • Renderer
  • Compositor
  • Sequencer

Those are evaluated from the bottom up - in other words: If you have e. g. a rogue image sequence in the sequencer, it will override your render result. So will whatever you do in compositing. So, whenever you get weird results after hitting F12 (no output/black screen/white screen/something totally different from your 3D scene), it’s often helpful to check the sequencer and/or the compositor for anything that may block your render result from being displayed.

I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re trying to achieve with your compositing nodes, but if you correct whatever you’re doing there and connect the Composite node, the output should be fine. Alternatively you can disable compositing entirely for the time being in the Render > Post Processing tab.