Weird Rectangular Shadows in Cycles Render

I’ve created a field of grass objects, but the shadows are acting strange:


The grass is set to be translucent, but adjusting the weights for those relevant nodes doesn’t seem to affect the problem. You can look at the object & node setup (use the below grass image in the image texture nodes) to see if you can spot anything:

LilyExample.blend (898 KB)


Thanks for checking it out!

The blend file does not contain the texture you are using so all it shows up as is the pink/purple. If you can pack the image with the blend file that would help. As I am not sure what the actual image consists of that you are using. n/m checking it out now.

Those are not shadows. You’re stacking more layers of transparent planes behind each other as the scene’s render depth for transparency is set to. Therefore Cycles terminates the ray tracing prematurely and the resulting pixels come out black.

Increase this value to about 32:


Increasing the max transparency fixed the problem. Thanks!