Odd blocks appearing

[treddie]

Hi!

This problem may be an old one, but I cannot find any posts that talk about it. If some do exist, could someone please direct me to it (them)?

I have attached an image showing some weird behavior when using custom lights. This example had a combination of Texture Environment + 3 lights, but I have verified that the problem is not with the Texture Environment.

My setup;

GTX560 (CUDA 2.1)
PMC
Texture environment + 3 lights

Standard "studio" setup I have used in the past, with a seamless bg and lights and reflectors in the studio.

Each light is a small, flattened cube that is covered in the front so that the light must bounce off a white parabolic reflector to reach the scene. I did this to help prevent or reduce hot spots and give the scene a more realistically lit studio feel.

Many thanks!

[FooZe]

Hi Treddie,

Are you happy to post the scene?
(or part thereof that still causes the problem. Does it still happen without the screw?)

Thanks
Chris.

[roeland]

Those "blocks" look like they are just the shadow of the thread of the screw.

--
Roeland

[treddie]

Sorry for the delay...The cable reception in my area of town was down for a few hours. So no TV, no internet.

Roeland > Not the screw thread shadow, but those subtle squarish blocks in the middle of that shadow and below it.

FooZe > Hm...Good call. Still there (see attached). Problem at bottom right.

[treddie]

Actually, it is more extensive once I let it render longer:

The background is a smooth seamless. So along with the squares, the abrupt changes in value should not be there.

...And here is the same render with more time on it:

I will run a 1.2 version to see what happens.

[treddie]

Same problem in 1.2 as well. I never noticed this before. I'll try 1.16

UPDATE: The problem does not show up in 1.16.

[FrankPooleFloating]

treddie, this is a weird one... but maybe there is some explanation, other than an Octane bug...

Have you tried swapping out that screw with something exactly the same size, but a less complex shape? (just as a test of course)

Do you possibly have some transmission (above zero) and light is traveling through the screw and creating these pesky blocks?...

Is the screw tripled?.. maybe an n-gon could cause this?...

Do you have a UV in the bg ramp - and it is definitely getting smoothed?.. maybe not, and only showing up in that one spot?

Just takin' a bunch of shots in the dark... twiddlin' thumbs while waiting on answer from client... bored.

[treddie]

reddie, this is a weird one... but maybe there is some explanation, other than an Octane bug...

Have you tried swapping out that screw with something exactly the same size, but a less complex shape? (just as a test of course)

Please see the new images above that have the screw completely absent from the scene.

I was hasty in my conclusion that the problem did not appear in v1.16...I did another set of tests with the camera pulled way back and that seamless bg has some serious issues in it that show up in all the Octane versions I have tested. It's probably more subtle in 1.16 but maybe only because the lighting system was improved after that and it wasn't really, in-your-face, noticeable before.

This is actually starting to seem like a bug on my end, as you suggest, but for a different reason. If any of you remember the Apollo helmet thing, you may recall I was having serious problems with face and vertex normals in my workflow. My final solution was to use Riptide's importer for meshes into C4D, with export via the Octane exporter. This studio setup of mine was built BEFORE I ironed that all out. I am going to rebuild the studio using the new workflow and see what happens and will report back.

In the meantime, here is my latest test with callouts:

[FooZe]

Yeah, if you have this thing set to smooth and there are some normal problems you might get this.
What do the deep channel kernels look like?

Thanks
Chris.

[treddie]

Weird...Deep channels look perfect: