I have a scene consisting of 3 layer.....the only lights are 2 point lights and the moon brightness is maxed...no sun???    the preview window shows a beautiful render just as i want it....i have the spheres right in front of the camera so the perspective view shows only black from the spheres....my render times have taken about 6 hours and then I get a black render like what is in the perspective view.......im using final and hypervue to render...is this a camera setting   what is the control on the camera settings the shows a color and you can change this and the last selection is an A.....in a box...   I noticed all the objects in my scene are on A but the camera has a color selected like what my renders are coming out like????

Any help greatly appreciated.  I'm sure is a simple setting I have wrong but I'm getting really tired of black renders.....

Peace and Love

TIMMYLYNN

What do you mean by 3 layers? That you organized your scene in layers in the world browser? If so, check your render settings, it may be that you have the "render active layer only" box checked.

Don't mind the colour of the camera in that panel, this colour is only for display, plants have a green colour, lights a yellow colour, but it's just a way of visualizing your scene elements faster.

Could you prvide a screengrab of the Vue interface of your scene? What atmosphere are you using?

A suggestion: always make a small render of the scene before the final one, to avoid surprises.

Another thing: check the atmosphere editor, and see if the light balance isn't all the way towards sunlight. If so, push it to the left at about 50%

hi ok i and using standard atmosphere...i did notice that apply settings to sunlight only was checked...this could be the problem as there is no sun......i also changed my resolution to very small...good suggestion....but now..im getting runtime errors from the rendercows...i just restarted both systems and am going to try again now.....

any other suggestions greatly appreciated...

Love and Peace

TIMMYLYNN

No sun with a standard atmosphere requires a lot of ambient light, and this will add a lot of grain to the render. You should switch to at least "global ambience", and apply settings to all lights, though radiosity would give better results. Your rendercow problem shouldn't be related to this, I don't recall having no sun bugging Hypervue.

Good luck.

whats really got me is that the preview window shows the render and when i hit the camera twice in the world browser and it brings up the camera preview....it shows the render????

ok i tried a whole different scene and i got another black render.....now I'm really confused......

Agree with Bruno, we could help better with screen dumps showing the render and light settings, etc.

As suggested, you could drop back to a simple default scene and keep your default (Final) render settings, then render small samples or small area selections on your main PC and troubleshoot from there.

Deleting the sun is okay, but your point lights do need that "Apply settings to all lights..." enabled, from what it sounds like. There is that flat black sky, in the SKys > Effects > others that's good for black scenes, space images, etc..

If you're using volumetric spheres, is volumetric lighting type required? Experiment with a small image.

Did a quick test of a primitive sphere with one of the volumetric materials applied to it:

This uses that black atmosphere and i colored the ambient light black in the Atmosphere Editor 'Light' tab. Volumetric light type is not required, i used Standard, but any will work. This is final render. If you don't want the horizon line, delete the ground plane (in which case the ambient light color will not matter for the ground planeSo, don't know why you have black renders.