Has anyone had this problem?: Big Valley Render Artifacts It seems to happen on any quality above preview, including a user setting I call preview plus.  I believe it has something to do with the ecosystem but cannot seem to isolate the offending factor.

Vue 8.4?

I'm looking in my use history of Vue 8.  I stopped updating Vue 8 at build 47776 because the updates after that build had so many problems.

I take it you used ecosystems in this scene ?  

Go to the materials tab and look under Ecosystem Materials (it's usually at the bottom of the list).  Go through those materials and make sure they're all showing correctly.  

I seem to recall having this happen a few years ago and it was one material that was causing it.

Quote - I take it you used ecosystems in this scene ?  

Go to the materials tab and look under Ecosystem Materials (it's usually at the bottom of the list).  Go through those materials and make sure they're all showing correctly.  

I seem to recall having this happen a few years ago and it was one material that was causing it.

It has something to do with solid growth plants and how they cast shadows.  The shadow itself is not calculated as a shadow but as black artifacts.  Sometimes the screen goes black at the end of the render until "auto-exposure" is unchecked.  However if I use any transparent object such as Big Brader's tree-like objects, there is no problem.  Also if I add a SG tree as an object there is no problem.  There is something wrong in this scene with the ecosystems that causes shadows to equal black only.  I am using a proceedural terrain with a simple material with 8 layers, 2 of those layers are ecosystems.

Is it a large scene file?   If you can get it to me I can take a look - I still have 8 Infinite installed.

Looks like I figured out what the problem was.  I had 2 terrain mats with global transparancy driven by a function.  I used this because it was used in the tutorial I was following.  However in my scene it caused black holes in the terrain.  So the simple solution is to simply turn it off which is fine by me.  I'm happy with the scene without it on.

Seeing as I'm a technician, you'd think I'd have figured this out in less time.  It was deceiving though because the holes were not very apparant unless rendered at higher quality and at larger sizes.

glad to hear you worked it out