Ok so I am trying to make a basic animation Showing a Penguin family growing in size and number. It starts with x3 Penguins standing on an Iceberg followed by x3 more Penguins fading in from being invisible, one by one.
I have Keyframed a Transparency Node through a Mix Shader to get this result but it seems to only hide the beaks and feet when fully rendering with Cycles where as they disappear completely when viewed in the Viewport.
The following are x2 Screenshots to show the Viewport rendering correctly followed by a Rendered Shot showing the issue, I will also include the .blend file.
(Ok scratch that, it won’t let me as a new member so I will send them to anyone who requests them)
I would love to find the problem and fix it with a few clicks but if there are any suggestions for starting again with alternate methods I am all ears.
Can you put the screen shots and file in a folder, upload that folder to google drive and post the link (set permission to “anyone with link”) here?
That way it’s here for anyone with an idea on how to fix it.
Is this the file with the problem? I’m only seeing two penguins, and there’s no transparency nodes, or mix shaders connected to them that I can see, unless I misunderstood what you meant.
I have no problem adding the nodes myself, and duplicating the penguins for tests, I’m just a little confused.
I don’t have a scene_014. Just a Test Set TS 03.
That’s okay. It’s the same material on the penguins, right?
What I notice first is the fur/feathers. Did you keyframe the transparency on those too? I didn’t notice it at first, and was getting similar results to you, but when I keyed that too, the whole penguin disappeared.
Keep in mind, those black lines remaining have to do with the number of light bounces, not the transparency itself. When I turned the number of transparency bounces up that effect went away.
Twelve worked for me when the subdivision modifier was turned off. Did you try it with it turned on? On my computer, with the modifier turned on, it had to be higher.
Ok so I have keyed all the hairs and it has done the trick!
Although now I am finding that I will need to go a bit crazy with the Transparency Bounces for Scene_014 (I added an image in the Google Drive showing what I meant earlier about it changing scene when uploaded, so you can have a looks for yourself in the .blend file).
I am guessing that the light or other objects in the scene are causing the difference.
I am able to achieve the desired result at around 144 Bounces but with around 250 frames to render at 14mins+ per frame is a bit out of my reach for this project.
I can lose a few samples but I would really like to keep it consistent with my other shots if possible and I am already down to 512.
These are the settings I used, if that helps you any (Between 1 and 4 minutes a frame. It differs because I was rendering my own animation in the background). I also found that turning the subdiv down from 2 to 1 required a bit lower bounces, but that will probably also require regrooming the penguins. You can try adjusting the noise threshold too. I put it up to .1 instead of .01 for test renders, and it didn’t look awful, so maybe play around with that.
This is with both the number of hair children and bounces cut in half, so you could also try adjusting the number of children particles vs transparency bounces, and see what works best.
