Hi, gang -- I've been working on a project for work that has been giving me some strange problems. I'm hoping someone can answer this question. The attached image (sorry it's so big -- smaller resolution wouldn't show the details necessary) is a frame from an animation for a video. Notice the "strange blocky artifacts" indicated by the lines? It may be hard to tell from the still, but there are these strange, square areas that change the texture of the terrain in the render. As the camera floats over the scene, the blocks move. There are also some odd linear artifacts within the blocks (which you can see just to the right of the left indicating line -- almost look like TV scan lines), and these linear artifacts change with the blocks. When I say the blocks move or change, it's kind of like the "garbage mattes" you might remember from the old release of Star Wars or from old episodes of Battlestar Galactica -- where blocky shapes (although in this render, the blocks always have 90 degree angles) move around space-ship models that fly through scenes? Am I ringing bells in anybody's head here? My question is, what's causing this? I've rendered the scene with the hybrid renderer. I never had problems like this in RDS using the hybrid. Any ideas? I'd be most appreciative of any help I get. Thanks! Dex

1.) Is the texture a map? 2.) Try the raytracer (who knows if that will help). -Kix

Also this might be a funky side effect of using terrains which I've experienced before. -Kix

That's a known bug - block artifacts when rendering terrains in the hybrid renderer. You can get rid of them by converting the terrain to a vertex object (wastes RAM) or use the Ray Tracer.

Cool. Thanks for the tips, folks. I really do love this forum!

YES!!!!!!!
i've never complained about this happening before, but I'm so glad to see someone post it.

i've had this happen (when not using terrains) in the hyb-ray when rendering large images in the background.

basically, i hit render and then switched apps using apple-tab, did some work for a while, popped back into C to check the progress, and it looked like there were giant areas of jpg compression.

granted this was before the 2.1 patch, and I haven't tried replicating it. I just render finals at night now, and sleep while the computer works.

-pix

P.S.

I'll bet that the square artifacts are the exact same size as the render blocks that parade accross the image (you see them when using SMP).

If you only have one proc, then it's the same size, but no colored block.

-pix