The linked renders both show a cube made up of 64 smaller cubes. In both cases it’s just one object.The first render shows the cube as is, not being part of an animation. It renders just fine. The second render shows strange artifacts when shadows or raytracing is enabled. This happens with or without a material. Note that each of the cubes faces is made up of 16 smaller faces. The artifacts however appear just between each group of 4 faces, not between every face. Blenders preview doesn’t show the artifacts. And they disappear when using a hemi lamp.
You have an animated shapekey that is forcing coplanar faces to overlap . Thus the render artifacts . Just make your shapekeys not do that . I.e. simply not just select the outer loops to scale when you make the shapekey but the entire object to scale if you are going to shapekey the scale of the mesh .
Actually the shapekeys are just moving the subcubes, the scaling at the beginning is done by using keyframes and scaling the whole object. the manipulation via shapekeys also just starts after that.
If your argument still applies, could you please go into a bit more detail. I don’t see where I force the faces to overlapp since in every shapekey the faces don’t overlapp. I’m still new to blender so there might be a problem in my using it…
The coplanar faces are there because you have shape keys that are not singular discreet meshes (Keys 12 and 23) but are separate subcubes extruding out … Actually If you just set the shapekeys to “Relative” (in the Shapes panel) you won’t get the artifacts .
I noticed that but I still don’t understand why. What makes absolute shapekeys generate coplanar meshes? I was under the impression that the difference between the absolute and the relative shapekeys is that you can mix the relative ones whereas the absolute ones are just that: absolute (with transition between the absolute keys inbetween the keyframes).
This is mostly conjecture on my part so if I am wrong hopefully some like Algorith can set it straight … But since you have actually divided your cube into seperate little cube meshes (which btw I have not seen before) when you have it set as absolute shapekeys you do get the overlap of faces because absolute shapekeys only stores/interpolates the vertex data, but not whether the vertices are connected or not … So when you just set them to absolute Blender has no idea that you want to blend the order of the vertices and reconnect the faces in the animation unless you set it to relative shapekeys .
All shapekeys, whether set to be relative or absolute, are just a set of vector data (a vector that is created by comparing the position of a vertex from one shape to the position of the same vertex in another shape) . This data set does not include whether there is an edge between two adjacent vertices (as usually there is) . But in your case since you have deleted edges/faces between vertices and apparently when you set the shapekeys to absolute blender simply moves the vertices to the right position but does not add faces/edges that are deleted/missing in another shape . That is you have the same number of vertices in each shape as required for shapekeys but not the same number of edges/faces .
So this is not actually a “bug” with shapekeys but an unusual application of them . I don’t think any developer had how you are using it mind when shapekeys were implemented … I mean shapekeys are mostly useful for animating a character’s face or other “organic” functions like lip syncing etc … none of which requires that you delete edges/faces to implement them … you just push/pull verts around for that .
I don’t know exactly what you are trying to animate but if it does involve cubes like this you might have better luck with the array modifier instead . Or just set it to relative and go on from there …
“But in your case since you have deleted edges/faces between vertices and apparently when you set the shapekeys to absolute blender simply moves the vertices to the right position but does not add faces/edges that are deleted/missing in another shape”
I used the array modifier and applied it to generate my cubes but I want them to move individually later in the animation. This seemed impossible with not applied array modifiers so I started this approach.
This also means: I don’t create new faces and edges. All is created in Frame 1 and just moved thereafter.
