It appears I’ve selected (or deselected) an option I shouldn’t. But after walking through the documentation and a few suggested standard render setups online, and randomly changing settings on and off I’ve not been able to find where I’ve goofed. A couple of nights ago my render preview started to be dark, with just the colour of the background impacting the model.
Here’s a screen cap of 3D view showing I do have a sun.
Hopefully what I’ve done is obvious to you. There are no errors in the log and the blue hue on the star destroyer is what it gives me in both the preview and final render also. I will be delighted if it’s something easy/stupid I’ve done. If not, I’ve put the .blend file up on dropbox here…https://www.dropbox.com/s/uxskdj3ng852lrt/SD.blend?dl=0
I noticed that you are in Experimental Mode.
Rendering in that mode gave me most weird stuff.
When I switched to Supported, it gave me this:
(Obviously the textures are missing, but the sun is working again)
Thanks for confirming you see what I’m seeing @motimo. I’m using 2.78c, the same the tutorial was created in, so we know it can work. Last night I tried other lamp types and none of them illuminated. I also went through the materials section of the tutorial again and I’m reasonably confident the nodes setup is what it should be.
Small update - I’ve found another symptom, the Experimental settings will also result in a clipped or incomplete render for me. For example, this first is using Supported rendering, 128 samples:
The sun is doing its job quite clearly there, and because those textures weren’t packed in the .blend file I uploaded, I get the materials with some detail. Now same scene, with the only change to settings being the change to Experimental:
No error shows on the blender console window but it isn’t all there. Thinking this might be due to running out of GPU resources I have tried messing with the render settings, decreasing samples to 32, subdivisions to 12px, subdivision step size to 1, and finally shifting to CPU rather than GPU compute but have not improved this result. Turning off transparency just shows the blue background. But the missing model stays…missing.:
I mostly work in BI, where there is a “clip region” for almost everything. The lamp, camera, or what-have-you only considers objects that lie within that range of distances from itself.
They can also be “layer-specific,” so that they “consider” only objects in the designated layer-numbers. (A layer-specific lamp can “shine right through” an object that would otherwise be occluding it, to then illuminate one object that is within its beam but not another.)
I think over the past few days I tried every setting in rendering, and adjusted textures, but the resolution was in the modifier stack. Moving the subsurf modifier above the mirror fixes both the clipping and the lighting issue.
