Environment Fog, 3D Textures and Invalid Color

[sebastiaaan]

Hey,

once I put a 3D texture (SolidFractal) in the density slot of the Vray Environment Fog (plugged in environment shader) I get the following errors:

// Warning: Material "baumrinde@material" produced overbright or invalid color (rgb=-1.#IND00 -1.#IND00 -1.#IND00). //
// Warning: Invalid light cache sample(s). //
// Warning: Material "pasted__boden_grey@material" produced overbright or invalid color (rgb=-1.#IND00 -1.#IND00 -1.#IND00). //
// Warning: Material "baumrinde_moos@mtl" produced overbright or invalid color (rgb=-1.#IND00 -1.#IND00 -1.#IND00). //
// Warning: Material "pasted__water@material" produced overbright or invalid color (rgb=-1.#IND00 -1.#IND00 -1.#IND00). //
// Warning: Material "VRayMtl4@material" produced overbright or invalid color (rgb=-1.#IND00 -1.#IND00 -1.#IND00). //

Rendering is pretty slow and the rendered image has tiny black pixels. I searched for a solution, however all the invalid color threads don't seem to come up with a solution.

Does anyone have an idea, what I have done wrong?

Image


Cheers,
Sebastian

[vlado]

Let me try to reproduce this here...

Best regards,
Vlado

[sebastiaaan]

Hey Vlado,

it seems like I got rid of it. I just scaled the place3dTexture up so it covers the whole scene.

Kind Regards,
Sebastian

[vlado]

That's good; we still have to fix the original issue though

Best regards,
Vlado

[yolov]

Hi sebastiaaan,

We were unable to reproduce the faulty result here. Could you please tell us more about the scene setup or send a scene over so we could see what the problem is?

Thank you in advence!

Best regards,
yolov

[sebastiaaan]

Hey,

of course, I will try to simplify my scene, since it's rather large and then send it to you. vraymaya@chaosgroup.com?

Kind regards,
Sebastian

[yolov]

You can send the scene to alexander.yolov@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
yolov

[yolov]

Hi sebastiaaan,

We reproduced the same result with your scene. It turns out that it is a bug and we've already added it to our bug tracker.
Thank you for reporting this problem to us.

Best regards,
yolov

[sebastiaaan]

Hey,

thanks for looking into it!

I have a new Problem, though. Since the environment fog is in the scene, a closeup seems to produce strange artefacts in some buckets. It looks like it doesn't render the fastsss2 properly, all of a sudden. Is this connected to the bug? If so, what can I do to resolve it?

Broken:


Normal:


Also, the rendering time for a close up is reaallly slow (13h on a 3930k @4,6ghz 32gb ram), this has also been the case before the environment fog was in. Most of the rendertime falls to the SSS2 Prepass (like 60-70% I would say), which has been getting gradually slower the more objects I imported in the scene (Prepassrate is 1). Is this normal and is there a way to speed this up? (General rendersettings: Adaptive DMC subdiv 1-6; Primary GI: Brute Force subiv 25; Secondary GI: Light Cache subdiv 660)

Before all the other objects were in, it rendered like 2 1/2 to 3 hours for a close up of her head. I compared rendertimes of a regionrender of her mouth a while ago, one with the whole scene and the other without. The one with the whole scene took about 10minutes, the one without took only 2 1/2-3 minutes. Both the renders looked the same. It seems like the SSS2 calculates a lot which it doesn't have to? Is there anything I can do about it?

It would be much appreciated, if someone could help me out here. I have been hitting a wall for a while now, especially with the render times.

Kind Regards,
Sebastian

[yolov]

We'll look into this, thank you for sharing the info.

Best regards,
yolov

[sebastiaaan]

Hey,
sorry, the artefacts were my fault. My other computer didn’t have access to the bump map.
The render time issue persists however... . I made another test and rendered an earlier version of her without an environment. It was fast compared to the other one with environment, just 1 hour and 20 minutes compared to 13 hours, for more or less the same image.
I then made several tests loading only parts of the scene and couldn’t find an object that kills the render time. The prepass gets gradually slower the more objects I import.

Image 1 hour 20 minutes


Do you have an idea, what I can do about it?

Kind Regards,
Sebastian

[yolov]

Hi,

Actually when we managed to reproduce the faulty pixels with the environment fog we also got the very slow render time. We have already added this bug to our tracking system and will hopefully fix it as soon as possible. Will write back to you to let you know when it is fixed.

Best regards,
yolov

[sebastiaaan]

Hey,

I'm having the invalid color issue on serveral frames again. Is there something I can do about it? It seems really random... .

Cheers,
Sebastian

[treyharrell]

I've noticed I get that issue sometimes when I alter light intensities on multiple lights via the channel box. Sometimes a couple random ones will pick up "INF" instead of a valid intensity and result in nans/negative colors etc. Seems to happen frequently with sphere and IES lights, less often with others.

I've learned to only edit more than one light at a time via the attribute spreadsheet instead.

Worth a look,

--T

[vlado]

Hey,

I'm having the invalid color issue on serveral frames again. Is there something I can do about it? It seems really random... .

Cheers,
Sebastian

Part of the issues in the original scene, was that some textures on the fog and the mesh lights could return slightly negative colors, which produced invalid floating point numbers in some calculations. I have added checks for these cases for the next nightly build tomorrow, so it should be better.

Best regards,
Vlado