Hi,

I am making animation and use quality firefly rendering IBL lightning.. only 2 light.. My problem is, sometimes some of the renders got corrupted shadows.. sometimes many of them, sometimes few here and there. Sometimes it renders well the whole project. I mostly render 500-1500 frame at in a raw. Corruption is not depend on frame numbers, it could be at first renders too.

Here is 2 type of corruption at shadow at same animation and correct one.

I got this error at older posers too. I am using pro 11 now. So what could be the problem here? What can i do about it? It ruins my hours of rendering.. thx!

What sort of shadows are you using? If it's depth mapped, there's your answer. Don't use 'em, they are garbage. If you are using them, have you got the "reuse shadow maps" option checked? If so and you absolutely are dead set on using depth mapped shadows, uncheck it.

SamTherapy posted at 1:00PM Sun, 13 March 2016 - #4260817

What sort of shadows are you using? If it's depth mapped, there's your answer. Don't use 'em, they are garbage. If you are using them, have you got the "reuse shadow maps" option checked? If so and you absolutely are dead set on using depth mapped shadows, uncheck it.

No, its ray tracing and only one light with shadow. Now i tried it as single render and it's corrupted too.. I remade the lights but still same.. i restarted computer, no change..

Really strange..

Not: I changed the displacement maps of the ground prop to bump map and it corrected the shadows even at the models with displacement maps still. So the render can't handle all the displacement maps at the scene as i understand. Is there a solution about this?

Hmmm. If by corrupted shadows you mean the dark square patches on the first and last images, that's a Shadow Min Bias problem, IIRC. At certain times, some polys cast shadows on themselves (yes, really) and produce this effect. Tinkering with the Shadow Min Bias settings in the scenery's materials should help. IIRC, you raise the value quite a lot to stop this from happening.

Anyone else feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm hopelessly wrong here; I don't render much lately, more modelling and rigging than anything else.

Just a thought - did you adjust the output of your displacement maps before plugging them into the PoserSurface Displacement input? (If they need adjustment, that is).

It wouldn't explain the intermittent nature of the problem, but it's something that might contribute to it by adding unwanted positive displacement over the whole surface.

Shadow min bias is 0,1.

I rendered 450 frame animation and there was corrupted ones (first and last example at 1.post) and good ones. But the shadow is the problem because every element got shadowing problem, not only ground object.

The funny thing is, i just removed only one part of the ground props displacement map and whole render get corrected, not only that ground part. Sam i will try the shadow bias..

Update:

I played with shadow min bias and it helped a bit. But the sudden strange shadowing catches me at some frames. I try different things and it disappear sometimes but i can't pinpoint the direct problem and at an animation frame, i can't move everything for just some frames..