I’m a complete Blender noob. But, I have worked in 3D. I am considering switching to Blender from another 3D app that I’ve used for years.
Screen captures of everything I mention below can be seen here in this PDF: http://millerstudio.com/PDF/broke_blender.pdf
My system: I use an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, late 2014), 4 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB RAM, with an AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB graphics processor.
I was going through the beginner tutorials by Blender Guru on YouTube. Everything was working fine.
I was completing the last Blender Guru lesson #9 on rendering (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25N775uHb_4&t=2s). In the lesson the “Cycles Compute Device” in the “User’s Preferences” under the tab “System” was addressed. My initial default setting was “None.” The other option offered to me since I am on an Apple iMac is “OpenCL”. I selected “OpenCL” and then “Saved User Settings.”
Now, when I render, the entire render is completely black. The “Viewport shading” setting of “Rendered” is also completely black. Page 3 of PDF.
I then switched the “Cycles Compute Device” back to “None”, and then “Save User Settings” again. But, all my renders are still black!
However, if I create a new, blank file, everything seems to be working, again.
I compared the default “Render” settings in the new black file, to the “Render” settings in the file I created in the tutorial. I was thinking I could set all the settings back as the default file settings. But, now it seems that settings have changed. Page 2 of PDF.
I would copy out the items from my file to a new file. But, I am such a noob at Blender, I don’t know how to do that! I tried the “Append” feature. But, OMG! What about a simple copy and paste? Anyway… Can anyone help this Blender noob?