Scene Breakdown

Note: Please see "Crash Dump Files" as well.

This part is a bit more work, but sometimes you have scene that simply do not wont to render. Or you get noise, or ....

You can change thousands of settings in a full scene with hundrets of objects, shaders, lights, textures, plugins.

I personally see it every time, a lot of artists are trying to find an issue inside a production scene and change this value, rendering, then that, rendering,...

But do you have time to change everything? Often the reason can be one single object. So how long until you find this needle in a haystack?

So the idea of the scene breakdown is to reduce the possibilites. Exclude possible reasons very fast.

The workflow is to change something (save the scene with a meaningful name what you have changed) and submit it to the farm.

While the scene is on the farm, you can probably do the next test scene and also submit it.

You could end up with 10 scenes at the same time rendering on the farm to see which one works.

The following list is a collection of steps you can try. Depending on the type of render issue you get.

Make this test render fast!

Set the Antialiasing to a low setting (MRay: -2 -2) or reduce the image resolution.

Reduce area light samples.

Reduce the time range.

Make a small test scene first.

Try to delete all gemoetry and just place a cube in it. If it renders, you know it is something in the scene.

If not, try a brand new scene with a cube only.

Make the test render fast/

Is it one of these render features?

Disable displacement in your render settings.

Disable shadows.

Disable volume rendering.

Remove all textures or replace all texture connections with a single 256x256 pixel image.

Is it a shader?

Remove all shaders and textures from the scene. Apply a lambert only.

Is it the geometry?

Is it a light?

Is the scene itself corrupt?/Is it a render setting?

Remove all Objects and place an animated sphere/cube into the scene.

Same for the lights, remove all lights and create one directional light only.

With only one light and one object in the scene you have not much left to test.

Perhaps the scene is corrupt? Try to create a new scene and merge your old into that one.

Is it one of my objects?

Which one?

Remove half of your objects. Save it as "_halfA". Open the orginal scene, remove the other half and save it as "_halfB".

If one of these scenes render, it could be one of the objects left.

Repeat the half-splitting ("_halfAA"+"_halfAB", "_halfABA"+"_halfABB"...) until you have the object.

Note: it could be the geometry, the shader or a texture applied to this object.

You know it is one of the shader networks.

So test single features of the shading network.

Create multiple scenes with only single parts of the shading network. Again, create multiple test scenes you can send to the farm at the same time.

You have two ways.

Either remove parts of the shading network one by one and send them to render:

no displacement

+no bump mapping

+no reflection

...

exclusively test single parts of the shading network:

- Main shader only (no textures)

- Main shader + Displacement

- Main shader + Diffuse texture

- Main shader + Reflection

- Main shader + Ambient Occlusion

- Main shader + Bump mapping

...