I am doing my first animation with the guidance of the “Noob to Pro” manual, and am using the new RC1. It is very short…only 24 frames. I’ve tested and it works fine on the timeline, but when I go to render, only black frames come up. Anyone know what is going on? (Someone else reported this today, but they were able to get a least some of their frames to render.)
Thanks!
~Terri
Check your render layer set up. Make sure that the buttons next to “Scene:” and “Layer:” on the renderlayers tab (F10) match up. Also make sure that you have a light on the layer that you are rendering. If you’re a noob: that RC1 version may just confuse the hell out of you because Blender is becoming an advanced compositing app where many things may “SEEM” to go wrong (even though they are functioning exactly as they should) if you neglect to set things up properly. I see this same question on a regular basis in these forums and I think I even answered it elsewhere either today or yesterday.
We really need a sticky post that deals with these basic setup issues because it can be quite confusing and it’s easy to accidentally screw things up without even realizing that you did it. Lotsa buttons, fields, sliders, etc…it’s enough to drive any noob nuts.
The current warp speed of Blender development is bodyslamming the folks who are trying to document the new features.
Attached is a screenshot of my render settings. Everything looks lined up, but am still getting black…
Thanks for the help!
Can you post a .blend? looks like you may not have your scene connected to the Composite node, but I can’t tell for sure as I can’t see your node setup. That will give you a blank result every time.
Here is the URL to my .blend file: www.terrieades.com/in_progress/blender/snowstorm.blend
I think you’re right about the nodes…I went and checked and the “Composite” wasn’t showing what it used to, (before I applied animation…now it is pretty much blank), but I do not know how to fix it…
You need to connect the image output noodle from your render layer to the image input of your RGB curve node. Without this connection there is nothing to render. That’s exactly the kind of oversight that I said we need a sticky for.
I was told to set it up this way so that my shadows would be more of a blue color, and it was working just fine until I started with animation… Not doubting you, but it’s all starting to confuse me!
I’ve posted an updated version of my file here: www.terrieades.com/in_progress/blender/snowstorm.blend
What is different now is that when I go to render, my cursor is now a black box with a little “1” in it…however, the screen is still black.
Thanks for all the help!
Didn’t have time to play with it B4 I went to the store but now I see what you mean. It looks like the file is corrupted, but there’s a lot I don’t know about Blender so I can’t say for sure. What I do know is how to fix it.
Here’s what I did: I selected everything in the scene and then created a new gropu with all objects via Ctrl+G, then saved the file. I then began a new .blend and appended the afore mentioned group via File>Append. You just scroll to where the file was saved, click it and go to the groups folder, selewct the group and press enter. Finally I resaved it with another file name. It works fine now, not sure what the problem was but it happens from time to time.If you want to have a look here it is. Like I said earlier - you did not have your renderlayer connected to the RGB or mix nodes. Have a look at how I recombined the shadow pass. Note that I did not recombine the diffuse pass…I’ll leave that up to you. Also I took the red slider in the opisite direction on the RGB node which gave the scene an eethereal look, which probably isn’t what you want (it added red to the highlights of all things) but it will give something to play with anyway. If you aren’t using a dual core machine you may need to turn the thread count back to 1 on the output tab in the render buttons. I also enabled Full OSA for each material in the material buttons and set your oversample rate to 16 in the render buttons. You may want to turn these options back down as well.
Here’s the .blend:
http://uploader.polorix.net//files/89/snowstorm2.blend
Thanks SO very much! 
I actually just took your file and duplicated the settings and appended the group on my own, (need to learn sometime!), and I DO think the first file was corrupted…when I was navigating the second one, I noticed so many options there that weren’t in the first one, (that should have been, based on the tutorials I was following), that probably would have greatly reduced the problems I had animating!
I learned another valuable lesson, one project=one version of Blender! 
This project was done with many different CVS versions, and I think that was probably its downfall. However, now that RC1 is out, I’ll just stick to it!
i saw that you were trying to output a quicktime render…yuk. for test renders of a single image, stick with an image format like jpg or png that avoids the whole codec issue.
I found my prison gal and her name is OpenExr. Were an exclusive couple, but I’ll gladly dump her for her multilayered sister…once she sheds a few megabytes, that is.
There are crazy things you can do to your scene like inverting your camera so that it only looks inward (which I thought was the case here but it didn’t turn out to be so). All you have to do is hold Ctrl while dragging downward with middle mouse button (only applies if the camera is the selected object, otherwise this just scales the view of the scene). That’s why I said “I think it’s corrupt, but…” It’s not entirely difficult to do something screwy to the scene and not realize that YOU are the culprit, not Blender. By the second or third time that you have the same curveball thrown at you, you’ll begin to realize what you’re doing that caused it or at least how to avoid the issue.
