Hi,

I am trying to render out a scene, 1 frame. When I render to picture viewer it is all black and nothing is showing. There's probably a setting somewhere that I don't know about. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Katja

Hard to tell from your description.

Any screen shots of settings?

Katja or Shannon? 

turner

The settings are nothing special, they are basically default. I hit the render to picture viewer and there's just black.

...and yes, it's both of us. we're working on a project together :)

Thanks.

found this ... http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/topic/49045-render-to-picture-viewer-black/

So was it the camera view?

If it's not resolved you can post the file here with out the models to see if I can fix it.

Change the suffix to .jpg

:)

turner

I'm not sure if this will help any, but it's a simple problem I occasionally ran into when I first began to use Cinema 4D, years ago. It vexed me for a while until I... uh... started paying some attention to what I was doing.

Here goes: If you've been doing any multi-pass renderings, i.e., like me, creating a matching, along with the normal color image, a depth map for later use in DOFpro, be sure you've returned the "channels" settings on the picture viewer set to "multi-layer display" and "red" "green" and "blue" checked on the "components" settings.

I used to check my depth map while rendering, out of curiousity, and then deciding what I was working on was 100% trash,  I'd simply delete most of the stuff I'd been working on, set up a different scene, using the same file as a template, forgetting entirely that the picture viewer was still set to display the depth map. Depending on the existance of objects in the foreground and the DOF settings, sometimes the depth map would be 100% black. What I would see is that nothing was rendering. (unaware, of course that the multi-layer image was being rendered, but I wasn't seeing it.

Might be worth a check.

I had several things going on ... one thing: I had lights set to Include mode, but no objects included.

In the view settings, set active window to "use as render view". :)

Attached Link: http://www.tutorialsworkshop.com

While I was rendering quite huge image (3636 x 2657) for Master & Servant challenge I found out that I wanted to render just a portion of image to verify if polycount is smooth enough in particular areas. For viewport usage there is this handy tool "Render Region" which is nice but with it I can only render low resolution version and to a modeling viewport only, not to a renderview or to a file.

Instead of rendering whole image just to check if everything is ok would be too time consuming, since every render took about 2 hours, so I ended up making this little mask which helped.

1. Make a foursided polygon. For example create Plane -object, change rubdivisions to 1 in x and y dimensons and convert it to a polygon object (hit C on keyboard).

2. Go to select polygons -mode and select this polygon.

3. Use "structure-extrude inner -function" and scale so this new polygon is at least 50% smaller than original.

4. Hit delete from keyboard to delete this new polygon, so you end up with a rectangle which has a hole in it in the middle.

5. Give it a render tag and disable everything but "Seen by camera".

6. To be really sure it's not affecting or get affected by lights create new material and activate only a luminance channel and change it to a pure black.

7. Bring it very near of camera-object (I used Transfer-function from Functions-menu).

8. Rotate it so that it faces towards scene-objects and move it a bit nearer to a objects but make sure that the outer sides of "mask" covers whole viewport area.

9. Scale and move it to reveal only a part of your scene you just want to render. With point-mode scale only the inner hole if needed.

10. That's it! Hit "Render to Picture viewer". Image is totally black except from area which hole "covers" and part of your scene is shown there. Rendering is fast on black areas so you can test render specified areas of huge images quite fast.

You can even render several different images where this "mask" is in different positions and combine those images together in imagemanipulation program. Another nice thing is that if just a portion of your image is wrong you can render just that part and combine it with original image by deselecting black areas. 

Quote -
While I was rendering quite huge image (3636 x 2657) for Master & Servant challenge I found out that I wanted to render just a portion of image to verify if polycount is smooth enough in particular areas. For viewport usage there is this handy tool "Render Region" which is nice but with it I can only render low resolution version and to a modeling viewport only, not to a renderview or to a file.

Instead of rendering whole image just to check if everything is ok would be too time consuming, since every render took about 2 hours, so I ended up making this little mask which helped.

Nice technique and potentially useful but you can, in fact, render the render region to the picture viewer and therefore to a file. Try this:

• create an interactive render region you want in the usual way - note that you can alter the quality of the output by dragging the little white arrow in the IRR up and down
• open the render settings dialog
• in the Output tab, select 'Render Region'
• click the little arrow next to the words 'Render Region' and click the button labelled 'Copy from IRR' (or if you want, you can type in the coordinates of the box you want to render)

From now on, when you render to the picture viewer, you'll only get the area of the image defined by the IRR. You can alter the settings at any time and you can even remove the IRR from the scene and you will still get the region rendered until you uncheck the 'Render Region' box.