Beauty pass is black when using exr and elements

[RichardBlank]

Don't know if I'm doing something wrong but sometimes when I render with elements and exr (not multichannel exr) the beauty pass is completely black except for the alpha that is correct.
It's strange that it always works fine when I'm rendering to multichannel exr? The multichannel is nice but so extremely slow to read in Nuke (this may be a problem in Nuke), that's why I'm not using it.

[vlado]

Is it reproducible, or it happens randomly?

Best regards,
Vlado

[RichardBlank]

My mistake again...
The problem was that when you're using all the elements you'll get one element that is named "imageName..exr" and one "imageName.exr".
The one with ..exr confused med but it seems to be the alpha.

[RichardBlank]

I took a look at it again and in one sequence i found no ..exr but the .exr was still black with alpha?

[vlado]

Can you show me your output file name template? Perhaps something goes wrong there and you are looking at some of the other render elements.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

yes some of the elements may not contain alpha. You might want to check them with alpha off.

[RichardBlank]

Can you show me your output file name template? Perhaps something goes wrong there and you are looking at some of the other render elements.

Best regards,
Vlado

Is it the file name prefix? In that case I always write %s/%s

[Hoegaard]

I had the exact same problem this morning, doing a local render with the animate flag turned on. I was not doing a batch render.

However, I am using the trial and assumed it was a bug fixed in the official release. I will test again to try and reproduce.

[vlado]

Can you tell me the exact steps to reproduce this?

Best regards,
Vlado

[jensl]

Hi,

I encountered this problem today on a batch render. After some investigation, I realized that it was due to a blank "materialSelect" render element. I hadn't plugged any shaders into this, thus the filename suffix was "". I suspect my beauty pass was saved to disk, then the render elements, and when that empty materialSelect element came up, it wrote blank frames to the render layer name, without a suffix, and thus overwrote the beauty pass. So in my case it was user error, but this could be what was happening for others, too. It might not be a bad idea to make this element, if empty, render with the suffix materialSelect, just so people know what it is and thus overwriting the beauty is avoided.

Jens

[RichardBlank]

Ok so that was the problem.

Thanks Jens!