When render artifacts ATTACK!!

[ZeBoxx]

That's sooooooo pretty!

Okay, seriously though... might it be that you have duplicate geometry ?

I.e. a copy of the head in the same location - causing this kinda artifacting ?

Only thing I can think of at the moment, though the colors look a bit weird (cyan/red - hrm)

Best regards,
Richard Annema

[magicm]

Okay, this may sound like a silly suggestion, but did you try to restart max? or even a complete system reboot?

[gnarlycranium]

There isn't any duplicate geometry... I know that can cause problems sometimes, but I've never seen it do anything quite like this...

Should've thought of the restarting thing earlier, I suppose... I tried it just now, and the spleckies have disappeared.... but what the heck causes this in the first place?! When will they be BACK to haunt and torment me?!

..Wait, I was wrong.. they're not gone. Just mostly. There's still teeny tiny red specks on the surface of the eye.

[MFreywald]

To just throw a suggestion off into left field... Might wanna check your CPU temp, RAM temp, VCard temp... Any changes to your hardware at all? Possibly new RAM?

[gaggle]

...
Tiny red specs...


..we... we've just recently had another thread with that problem. Contagious render-decease?

Hm.

[gnarlycranium]

Originally posted by MFreywald
To just throw a suggestion off into left field... Might wanna check your CPU temp, RAM temp, VCard temp... Any changes to your hardware at all? Possibly new RAM?

Wow... I don't even know HOW to check something like that!! And no, no new RAM or anything... not in months, anyway.


It is a mystery... I HOPE it's not contagious!

[cdinic]

open ur case and carefuly place ur hand on the cpu heat sink and then the gpu heat sink. if u can't hold u hand on it because it's to hot.. IT"S TO HOT.. that might be the problem.. but please avoid the fans.. a friend lost a finger tip in his case last year

-Chris

[gaggle]

I'd say it's a longshot if red specs starts showing up in a render because of heatrelated stuff. I can see the logic behind it, but.. I've never heard of anything like it.. it just seems too far-fetched to me.

You could, I suppose, try to shut down the machine, let it cool off four a few hours, then power on and render as soon as you can.

I'd perhaps sway more towards reinstallation or the likes..

Gnarly, I don't think it's been covered yet, does this happen outside that specific scene? Does it happen if you render a blank scene? What about some third-party rendere? (e.g. Brazil demo, vRay demo, etc.) Can you describe more symptoms of this weird poop? (can you detect a pattern when they strike for instance?)..

[halo]

had the similar thing once....i had lost the fan on the gfx card...looks like hardware failure to me, run with the case open and check fans, then check loose cables, then ram and drive...

could be interference of course...got any radio stations on your desk? ;)

[qu2k]

one time i had a lot of artifacts in my renders when i would just take a box and click render. i just reinstalled max and it worked fine after that

[gnarlycranium]

cdinic -- open ur case and carefuly place ur hand on the cpu heat sink and then the gpu heat sink. if u can't hold u hand on it because it's to hot.. IT"S TO HOT.. that might be the problem.. but please avoid the fans.. a friend lost a finger tip in his case last year

Ummm... poking the guts of a computer while it's running just seems like a bad idea. From what I hear, a person can get burnt and zapped and bit by all kinds of gizmoids in there! :argh: I'm no hardware whiz, I know not how to tame the savage beast that is my comp's innards...


gaggle-- Gnarly, I don't think it's been covered yet, does this happen outside that specific scene? Does it happen if you render a blank scene? What about some third-party rendere? (e.g. Brazil demo, vRay demo, etc.) Can you describe more symptoms of this weird poop? (can you detect a pattern when they strike for instance?)..

It's not a problem that happens often enough for me to have found a pattern in it. I've only seen it as bad as in that pic a few times, and usually it comes and goes with NO explanation or warning whatsoever. There are no third-party things involved, but one thing I HAVE noticed is that it happens with the raytrace material-- both the skin and the cornea of the eye in that pic have raytrace materials on em. The eye is the only part showing artifacts today, the cyan dots on the skin are gone... I have a feeling it's something to do with the reflections.

I thought maybe if I put up this pic, other people would turn up saying that they'd seen it before... I wasn't expecting it to be this mysterious. Interesting.

[Aaron Moore]

perhaps it could be attributed to bad ram or some kind of corruption that occurs post render engine....

Have u ran some kind of ram diagnostic?

[gaggle]

Mysterious indeed.

Does any of these scenes feature anything artifacty on other computers?

[halo]

see if it only happens with raytracing or GI....the reason i say this is because if you look at task manager you'll see that when doing these types of rendering your processor is 100% flat out...it pushes the system much harder than scanline

we have 2 systems here that overheat and its normally using raytracing or something like max's DOF

its hardware, i'd put money on it, could even be your PSU on its way out and its suffering under load

[gnarlycranium]

As far as I know the RAM is hale, it's actually fairly new.. but it COULD be bad, I suppose...

I don't have MAX installed on any other computers, but I suppose I could try it later.

MAX 4.2 doesn't have GI. I am quite sure though that this problem only happens with raytracing.

As for the hardware... this computer is running a rather old GeForce 2 MX...

[MFreywald]

Hehe, it's funny to see how many people 'took the ball and ran' when I mentioned a possible heat condition. Like I stated in my orig message it was aimed towards left field and most likely not the cause but possible. I for one would start with reseting max and trying a simple raytraced material on a simple object like a sphere. If that's all good, try going through the materials in your scene on the sphere. If still all good. Render the scene one object at a time by hiding the rest.

[gaggle]

I'll eat my nonexsisting hat if anything in the rendering is affected by the graphicscard.

The logic behind it being heatrelated, ie. the CPU is overheating, more or less makes sense in theory. It doesn't really.. I don't know.. I don't think that'd be why. But as suggested, you could try to shut off the computer for a few hours, then hit render as the first thing after booting. Just to see if there's anything different in that.

Or play a game or run a demo (or just anything CPU intensive) for a few hours to let things cook properly, then see if Das Spots has returneth with a vengance.

Get that scene rendered on some other machine though, at work, or a friends house, or email it to me?.. I could give it a render. If it turns out it's the MAX file that is cursed, then it's gotta be a software-problem of some sort.

Ahh.. troubleshooting.. it's all about prodding the problem in various ways to learn its behaviour :)

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