UV map rendering instead of changed procedural texture

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi, I just upgraded to 3.0.1, and have been experiencing some difficulties managing materials. I currently have three objects in the scene (which I will eventually merge):

  • our protagonist’s uv-mapped body
  • a futuristic black uniform
  • the shoulder padding for the futuristic black uniform
  • (well, there are the default hair and the eyes and stuff too… not important atm)

rendered-3d
rendered-3d1283×566 94.2 KB

The character has skin-tight gloved arms as part of her futuristic black uniform. To accomplish this I modified the uv-mapped body: I added a new shader slot in the node editor and assigned all the “gloved” faces to the black uniform color. All the gloved faces were previously attached to the uv-mapped node tree in slot 1.

The shoulder padding and separate uniform objects were never uv-mapped. All three objects share the same black uniform shader: a principled bsdf with a material output node. (I had “uniqued” the shoulder harness in order to change its color while messing with it, but I have not modified any other characteristic of either the unique copy or the remaining linked black ones.)

Everything usually shows properly in the 3d view with material preview, but once I try to 3d view preview render it I get the effect on the body and uniform object you see above. It seems to be related to the subsurf modifier. (There are just the default armature + subsurf, in that order, in the modifer stack.) It looks to me like smooth shading is off, but I have explicitly marked all the vertices using the mesh → shading → smooth faces menu option. Other things I have done:

  • verified that all normals are facing outward
  • tried to link texture coordinates:uv → principled normal
  • experimental is off (no microdisplacements, but I intend to use them!)

Here is the way it renders (this picture is Cycles, but it looks the same in Eevee):

rendered-cycles
rendered-cycles162×546 16.8 KB

It appears that the uv-mapping (slot1) seems to be competing with the black principled shader (slot2) on the character’s body. Notice also that the hip (uniform object) appears fine in the render. The shoulder pads object always appears fine.

I have no idea where to even begin looking to figure out what this weirdness is.

2

share the file if you can, it could just be weird material assignments

3

After staring at it long enough I finally figured it out. It is my fault — I’m still getting used to the new Blender UI (compared to ages ago, lol). I had hidden a duplicate mesh, but I did not disable the render (via the camera icon in the outliner). So when rendering I was properly getting both meshes.

So simple.
So dumb.

So, anyway, that’s what it looks like when there are two identical meshes with competing shaders (skin), plus one where the surface has been moved only veeery slightly (uniform). The shoulder pads had no duplicate, therefore they display no rendering artifacts.

I think I will rethink keeping “original” copies of objects in the blend — instead just save as a new blend and/or use a versioning repository.

Thanks for looking anyway!