Lately I've been doing a lot of rendering but I seem to get a patch of grey in the top left corner.  Since I'm using a quad core processor I have the threads set to 4.  So in the lower left quadrant I also have a patch of grey in its upper left corner.

How do I get rid of these annoying grey patches in my render?

Can you post an image of what you get when you render?  Maybe a before render and after render?

If you're talking about the very first row of pixels, and not further within the image, bumping up the samples from the default 3 will get rid of that.  May have to use the manual settings for that.  I don't use auto, so I'm not sure.

John

Ambient Occlusion, in conjunction with Irradiance Caching, can do that.

The cache is based on recording information left to right, top to bottom, to be used in the next bucket. But the first bucket (upper left corner) has no buckets before it so the cache is empty. You need to increase the Irradiance Caching value enough to get the first bucket to skip the cache.

I think.

Of all the suggestions I tried it seems increasing the sampling past 3 helped, the grey has been minimized enough where I can fix it in photoshop.

The irradiance caching was already at 100.  Increasing samples to 4 helped.  I would try 5 or 6 but then it would take too long to render since i have to render a ton of other images!

THanks for your help guys.

Any other recommendations would be great.

how big a patch, you could reduce bucket size or increase the image height or width by 1 bucket dimension and then crop it

Quote - how big a patch, you could reduce bucket size or increase the image height or width by 1 bucket dimension and then crop it

These patches are getting ridiculous. I didn't want to have to crop them out by increasing size.

Increasing the samples helped a little bit, but they are still there. .... This sucks

I have it said on "Final" for firefly and even on the highest of settings i still get grey patches.

I think its something to do with the camera. Something is in its way somehow or something. By changing focal & perspective i seem to have been able to minimize it or make it go away entirely but then my camera angle is not good for a render!

The pieces of grey sometimes appear as geometry of other objects in my scene which is very strange. I don't get what's going on! lol

OK i just confirmed it. The grey patches are actually pieces of geometry from another object in my scene.  I don't understand!

Now you're making me wonder if you accidentally gave a bad clue in the beginning, and as a result we've all gone in the wrong direction.

You said "I seem to get a patch of grey in the top left corner.  Since I'm using a quad core processor I have the threads set to 4.  So in the lower left quadrant I also have a patch of grey in its upper left corner."

Now you show us a render, but you only let us see what looks like the first two buckets from each renderer. You really can't expect us to figure it out with no knowledge of your relative camera position  with respect to props and figures, no knowledge of those props and figures, and no knowledge of your camera settings, and on top of that, you won't show us the picture.

What if it isn't about the upper left corner, but rather its about something else.

Since you're stuck, give us a full render, and the other info, and let us judge.

Off the top of my head, I'd suggest you adjust your camera "Hither" setting, since you may be too close to some props.

Another thing is to let the render complete even if it's wrong.  At least let it get past the first bucket.  In my experience if you cancel during the first bucket you get whatever random junk was finished calculating when you cancelled (often grey space).  Pretty hard to diagnose like this.

My conclusion is that poser is an inferior program.

Hopefully poser pro will weed out mom & pop problems like these.

You guys are telling me you've never gotten grey patches in the top left corner of your render quadrants (depending on how much cores you specified) in a complex scene?

I'm going to do a full render here in a bit and post it.

Grey patches like you're talking about, not that I recall, no.  Poser's renderer does indeed do some goofy stuff at times, but I can't recall that one.

This sounds like the problem I have with P7.  If this is the same thing then those streaks are actually holes in the alpha channel.  Altering the number of threads used and lowering the bucket size can help -the holes are usually limited to one bucket- but I could never get render settings that would eliminate them altogether for every situation.

I contacted efrontier tech support about this when I first got P7 shortly after SR1.  They told me that it was a known issue that was fixed with SR1 for most people, but not me.  They offered me no solution or advice other than to use the P4 engine.  I began using the P4 render engine, which is faster using one CPU core than Firefly is with four, and in my opinion just as good, unless you need things like advanced AO or raytraced reflections, etc...  Unfortunately P4 doesn't handle the advanced shader tree, and it was fairly crash happy.

Recently I had a project where I had to use figures that used the advanced firefly shader nodes, which render as distorted rainbow colors in the P4 engine, also P4 would crash after rendering animations for a few hours (A massive waste of time).  So, back to Firefly, and the streaking problem which still hasn't been fixed as of SR2.

Again I contacted tech support about this.  They told me this is a known issue that can happen when the camera geometry intersects other geometry in the scene.  I looked over my scene to make sure the camera wasn't intersecting anything, it wasn't.  I noticed for me that the holes are patterned on geometry behind the camera.  I tell tech support this, they tell me that this is a "known issue" that is scheduled to be fixed in SR3, which is due out later this year (that's as specific as he got).  He told me he would try to find a work around and get back to me, he never did.

When I turned visibility off for objects behind the camera, the streaks went away, so that is the best solution that works in certain situations, but not all, obviously.  At least with this way I can get a streak free render without tweaking the render settings endlessly.

If you're familiar with the recent history of poser, you'll know better than to hold your breath waiting for SR3, or P7 Pro.

My best solution was to get Carrara 6, its not totally in-line with poser, but it is very good with poser content (as long as you don't need to use poser 5+ shader nodes) and Daz content is fully supported.  The best part is that the render engine is light years ahead of poser.  The render engine, on my computer, renders 10 to 20 times faster than P7, no exageration.  Image quality is also better on carrara default settings than posers mid range settings.  You know how poser ray traced shadows are harsh and distorted around the edges unless softened?  Not with Carrara.  You can also look at Vue as an option (which can render the advanced poser shaders).  I mentioned Carrara first because the product line is cheaper and the render engine speed really does blow me away.

So, to sum up your options  (And I want to point out I had to come up with all these myself,  except for no.1  Poser tech support gave no other help.):

1.  Use the P4 engine.
2.  Test render and tweak the firefly settings endlessly until you eventually get settings that produce a usable image.
3.  Turn visibility off for geometry that is behind the camera.
4.  Get Carrara or DS or Vue and render in that.

I eventually settled on 4.  even though I'm ticked that I have to spend extra to get something that should have come with poser in the first place (a working and stable render engine).  I have to say the money spent on Carrara is worth it in the time it saves over poser's slow-as-molasses render engine.

Quote - This sounds like the problem I have with P7.  If this is the same thing then those streaks are actually holes in the alpha channel.  Altering the number of threads used and lowering the bucket size can help -the holes are usually limited to one bucket- but I could never get render settings that would eliminate them altogether for every situation.

I contacted efrontier tech support about this when I first got P7 shortly after SR1.  They told me that it was a known issue that was fixed with SR1 for most people, but not me.  They offered me no solution or advice other than to use the P4 engine.  I began using the P4 render engine, which is faster using one CPU core than Firefly is with four, and in my opinion just as good, unless you need things like advanced AO or raytraced reflections, etc...  Unfortunately P4 doesn't handle the advanced shader tree, and it was fairly crash happy.

Recently I had a project where I had to use figures that used the advanced firefly shader nodes, which render as distorted rainbow colors in the P4 engine, also P4 would crash after rendering animations for a few hours (A massive waste of time).  So, back to Firefly, and the streaking problem which still hasn't been fixed as of SR2.

Again I contacted tech support about this.  They told me this is a known issue that can happen when the camera geometry intersects other geometry in the scene.  I looked over my scene to make sure the camera wasn't intersecting anything, it wasn't.  I noticed for me that the holes are patterned on geometry behind the camera.  I tell tech support this, they tell me that this is a "known issue" that is scheduled to be fixed in SR3, which is due out later this year (that's as specific as he got).  He told me he would try to find a work around and get back to me, he never did.

When I turned visibility off for objects behind the camera, the streaks went away, so that is the best solution that works in certain situations, but not all, obviously.  At least with this way I can get a streak free render without tweaking the render settings endlessly.

If you're familiar with the recent history of poser, you'll know better than to hold your breath waiting for SR3, or P7 Pro.

My best solution was to get Carrara 6, its not totally in-line with poser, but it is very good with poser content (as long as you don't need to use poser 5+ shader nodes) and Daz content is fully supported.  The best part is that the render engine is light years ahead of poser.  The render engine, on my computer, renders 10 to 20 times faster than P7, no exageration.  Image quality is also better on carrara default settings than posers mid range settings.  You know how poser ray traced shadows are harsh and distorted around the edges unless softened?  Not with Carrara.  You can also look at Vue as an option (which can render the advanced poser shaders).  I mentioned Carrara first because the product line is cheaper and the render engine speed really does blow me away.

So, to sum up your options  (And I want to point out I had to come up with all these myself,  except for no.1  Poser tech support gave no other help.):

1.  Use the P4 engine.
2.  Test render and tweak the firefly settings endlessly until you eventually get settings that produce a usable image.
3.  Turn visibility off for geometry that is behind the camera.
4.  Get Carrara or DS or Vue and render in that.

I eventually settled on 4.  even though I'm ticked that I have to spend extra to get something that should have come with poser in the first place (a working and stable render engine).  I have to say the money spent on Carrara is worth it in the time it saves over poser's slow-as-molasses render engine.

THanks for the response.   I'm slowly wanting to head to VUE anyways I think.

Very interesting discussion ... I have the same grey patches since some days in the upper left corner of each render thread. Equal if using 1, 2 or 4 threads.

They came with a relatively huge model of a building and there mainly if positioning the camera inside of the building but without touching that geometrie. As first I thought of some interference between the memory holding geometric data and render space.

But that it's a shadow of geometries behind the camera seems to me indeed true.

The easies work around I have found is to use P6 if you have it also on the computer.
The same PZ3 with the complete scene and camera position causing the grey patches in P7 will render absolutly clear in P6 ... ok, you loose the possibility to use more than 1 thread, so it's a little bit slower on multi core pc's ...

So let's hope for next SR ...

Joachim