Why can't I import "Images As Planes"?

[justavisitor]

OK, now it gets really weird:

I tried a much larger HDR image instead of the .png - and not only did it work; the .png suddenly worked too when I switched back!

Does this make any kind of sense?

EDIT: I repeated the procedure (switching between the HDR and .png), but now it didn't work... It seems like Blender is aware of the difference between the two images, though - it takes a few more seconds to render the larger HDR image, though the result is the same cube...

EDIT2: And now it works again. In other words, the whole thing seems rather unstable: One time out of three, I get the correct render; the rest of the time Octane either renders the cube without the image OR it doesn't render anything at all...

[mib2berlin]

Hehe, never had problems with that.
Add test file, format of image should not matter.
Please add sys specs and your test file, may we can clear this up.
Btw. may you can add your sys specs to your signature, save a lot of time.

Cheers, mib

[justavisitor]

Thank you very much again mib, you've been extremely helpful: I now know what I already suspected last night, that something's wrong with my setup - I just don't know what, and I'd love to hear any suggestions!

Here are my specs:

i7-4820K 3.70GHz, 16 GB RAM, Win 8.1., 2 x GTX Titan, Blender Octane Edition 1.20.2 - 2.5 beta (2.68a), latest Win/Titan drivers.

And here are two screen shots of your project; one in Material view where you can see the mapped image - and a rendered version where you can't!

[mib2berlin]

Hi again, hm, 1.2 is so old I cant remember the material settings.
I tried the demo, which is 1.5 but cant even run Blender without kill my 2.1 install.
I am out of ideas, may some other user or JimStar has better brain memory than me.

Cheers, mib

[justavisitor]

Hi again, hm, 1.2 is so old I cant remember the material settings.
I tried the demo, which is 1.5 but cant even run Blender without kill my 2.1 install.
I am out of ideas, may some other user or JimStar has better brain memory than me.

Cheers, mib

Uh, I wasn't aware it was so old.

I'll try and find a newer version. But I'm more interested in speed than new functions so I don't think vs. 2.x is the right choice for me.

[justavisitor]

mib, you made me upgrade to vs. 2 and now it works, so thank you very much once again!

However, one thing puzzles me:

If you compare our two renders you'll see they're extremely different. I assumed that all your settings would be transferred along with your project? The texture on your version looks correct, while mine obviously is overexposed and way too yellow.

Also, I don't understand why F12 (or the menu-equivalent) doesn't work in my case, as you can see on the image... [EDIT: JimStar just explained that the render server only can do one job at the time, so that's not an issue at all.]