AoA Advanced Ambient/Spot Lights excluding surfaces with flags set to none!

avmorgan

I've been digging for any kind of help for this for months without finding even a reference to this problem elsewhere, but it is happening to me on every scene where I've so much as waved an AoA advanced light at it. Usually, I am trying to work with a light rig that includes an ambient light (which I sometimes delete, because I wanted other lights in the rig), and I usually stick with the default light and material settings, but even though I use "flag surfaces with: none" by default, and my spot and smaller test renders look correct my full size renders inevitably have critical surfaces blacked out as if they had been flagged.

This is really starting to piss me off, and I find it odd that no one has encountered it, but I've searched on every keyword I can think of related to Age of Armor light problems with surface flagging or render blackouts. The only thing I get that is on topic is the product and tutorial pages.

I have had partial success working around the problem by setting it to render flagged surfaces with shader hitmode, but that does not seem to be working for me today, so I am here posting a cry for help.

I really love these lights, but this problem is pushing me over the edge! According the the documentation, the "none" setting should cause all surfaces to render normally. That is not the behaviour I am getting out of my lights. Can anyone tell me why, or what to do about it? Again, it never happens in spot or small test renders; it only occurs when I'm going a full render, so it always ends up wasting hours of rendering time--often several times in a row (again, because the spot/test renders are good, but the full render is corrupted) with occasional shuffling of blacked out surfaces as I try to figure out what's causing it to treat them as flagged.

Just a note: I've had whiteout issues too, which with the help of the forum I was able to narrow down to permissions issues in Windows; the fix was to run DAZ in administrator mode. Unfortunately, after seeing good test renders again, even more surfaces were blacked out on the next full render. I also suspect there's a UV conflict in the Gianni skin materials... I can't tell if I've fixed it because I can never get those surfaces to render!

mark128

Is it skin materials that you get the black out on or do you see this on other materials also?

Do you ever run more than one DAZ Studio window at a time? Running more than one window at a time can cause corruption in temporary directories DAZ Studio uses for rendering, even if you are only rendering in one of those windows.

mark128

I did a test render with Gianni and 1 AoA Advance Spot Light, One AoA Advance Ambient light and a combination of the two. I had Flag Surface Shader With set to "None".

Are there any errors in the log file when you render? Got to Help -> Trouble Shooting -> View Log File. Look at the end of it right after the render and see it there are any msgs that look like errors. You can post them here.

avmorgan

Is it skin materials that you get the black out on or do you see this on other materials also?

Do you ever run more than one DAZ Studio window at a time? Running more than one window at a time can cause corruption in temporary directories DAZ Studio uses for rendering, even if you are only rendering in one of those windows.

Hmmm. Good question. It is most common with skin materials, but it occasionally does come up on props and set pieces--most often on a ground plane, in the latter case. The attachment shows what I mean. Often, when I try to fix it, the blackout changes to a whiteout next. I just learned that was a sign of file access problems...

The second question is intuitive. These problems have usually occurred when I've had multiple windows open; I pretty much have to in order to get any work done since renders (even test renders) take so much time. I can't say I'm happy to discover the problem you mention after dropping a few thousand on DAZ products and resources. I need to be able to keep working (setting up and spot rendering or test rendering) in another instance while another is tied up in a final render. That was my whole reason for upgrading to a multi-core system crammed with as much RAM as I could force in.

Are there any errors in the log file when you render? Got to Help -> Trouble Shooting -> View Log File. Look at the end of it right after the render and see it there are any msgs that look like errors. You can post them here.

I did look at the log file and found errors referring to missing temp files, so that seems to confirm your earlier warning. I'll be running a solo instance to see if normal behaviour returns. If so, I'm basically screwed anyway, since it will kill my workflow to do nothing every time I render.

mark128

I have several suggestions you can think about to work around this.

You could try using multiple accounts on a win7/8 PC. The default temporary file location is in users Appdata folder, so if you are running DAZ Studio under a different user name, you will not step on the temp files for the other account.

You can get your free single license for the standalone version of 3Delight (http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=3DSP_download). The standalone version is command shell utility that has no GUI. In DAZ Studio you use the Render To RIB option (bottom of advanced render options), then you use the standalone version to run the render. The free standalone version is limited to using 4 cores or threads. On my 4 core/8 thread I7 system the render time of the standalone version is 5-10% longer than the DAZ Studio version. I think this is because hyper threading does not buy you that much when running 3Delight.

Now I found the standalone version almost impossible to use with DAZ Studio, because render to RIB produces all the files in the temporary location and then empties the temporary directory when you exit DAZ Studio. What made it usable for me is Batch Render for DAZ Studio 4 and RIB. This will allow you to set the directory for all the temp files when you render to rib that is different from your temporary directory. It will also generate the windows command shell script to actually run the render.

The big advantage of Render to RIB and the standalone 3Delight is 3Delight actually uses very little memory when rendering compared to DAZ Studio. You have a lot of memory left to use DAZ Studio. Also since the standalone version will not max out all your cores, you will actually have some computing power to run DAZ Studio. When I am running a big render, I doubt that a 2nd DAZ window would be usable. You must have a really big computer.