Linked animated objects are not rendered

STEPS:

  1. I link an object in my scene.
  2. Duplicate with SHIFT+D
  3. Animate Scale
  4. Offset Animation couple frames for each object

RESULTS:
Linked objects are not render until all instances appear in the scene.

Is this normal?
Am I doing something wrong?
Is it a bug?

Bellow screen-shots proving my theory plus the blend file

Many_monkeys.blend (452 KB)
monkey.blend (465 KB)

Didn’t know that i can only attach max of 3 files?!
The screen-shots will go to next post.

The Screenshots:




Two More:




If i make them proxies everything works OK but when I try the same method on a more complex object (111.000 faces) it takes ages to render a single frame.

Is this the right way of doing things ?

I’m surprised that there are no answers yet!
I thought I was asking something basic…

Anyway I did another test this time skipping the proxy step and Blender behaves strangely.

  1. I have a complex object (in my case a tree) in a separate file and on its own group.

  2. I import it as linked object and put it in a garbage layer.

  3. I palce and Instance with SHIFT+A and duplicate with ALT+D a couple of times (max 10 objects) so my copies can share the same data.

  4. I slightly rotate them on Z axis to add some variation.

  5. Then I animate their scale from 0 to 1.

  6. If I try to render an animation Blender crashes in a blink of an eye.

  7. If I try to render a still frame before the key-frame with a scale equal to 0 Blender crashes again.

  8. If I try to render ten frames after the key-frame with a scale equal to 0 both animation and stills render with no further problems.

I think this is a rather odd behavior.
I suppose it is not a memory issue since there are 16GB of memory in my machine.

I’ll wait for your suggestions and if there are not any I’ll consider it a bug and report it.

It feels lonely in here.

I’m the only one repling my own thread…

…but I think I found the cause of all evil.
If setting the scale to anything else than 0 but quite close to it like 0.001 everything works OK.
It’s a strange behavior but I’m not sure if this is considered a bug.
If anyone has an explanation I would like to hear it.

I’ll wait a couple of days if theres no answers or proposals I’ll mark it SOLVED and not a BUG (though I still have my doubts).

I think this is a bug. I never scale objects to zero and it’s evidently not a good thing to do, but this should not crash blender and it should not cause other objects not to render.
I don’t know whether to report or not, because it has been reported in the past:

https://developer.blender.org/T18020

and Ton replied this:

Object and Group transformations assume matrices can be inverted, a zero size won’t work for that, that’s a known limitation in all of blender. The only thing we can do is prevent such values and replace with 0.0001 in code or so, so things at least work predictably.
I’ll put that on todo for later.

BTW:
“Typically a scale of 0 should not render anything.”

That is not true, the object has been transformed somewhere to infinity… this is not desired behaviour.

BTW.: It has been reported almost 7 years ago, so maybe you should report it.

@maraCZ: Thanks for the reply and for the link, though I’m surprised that is a know bug not fixed from 2008 !!!