Weird Camera that Doesn't See Materials?

joelmarklee

Hello-

In one of my scenes, if I view the scene via one particular camera, many of the scene materials are missing.  For instance, it is an interior scene, and walls appear to be completely white instead of displaying their textures.  In addition, some of my characters have fiber mesh facial hair (Unshaven for G2M) and their facial hair appears to be white.  When I render the scene (even through the problematic camera), everything looks fine.  When I view the scene through any other camera, the textures are present.  So functionally, I guess everything is okay.  

What I want to know is if there is some kind of setting that I'm not aware of that could cause this, or if I just have a "broken" camera.  

Thanks!

BeeMKay

You probably switched the preview function. In the view of that camera, go to the little ball left of the box that tells you what camera  you are using. When you click on the little square, it will offer you a variation of preview shading modes. Depending on what you are working at, you maybe want to use that mode you are currently using, instead of the shader coloroured preview mode (that's the icon in my screnshot). It's worth experimenting with it, to see what each of the settings is showing. So, your camera most likely is not broken. 

joelmarklee

That was my first thought, but no, the preview is set to show textures.  To give you an idea of how weird this is, while working with the problem camera, all of my characters lost their hair.  As in, the hair just disappeared off the tops of their heads for no apparent reason.  Again, when viewing the scene with another camera, the hair is there, and when doing a render, even with the weird camera, everything is fine.

I think I'll just chalk this up to a weird glitch and ditch the camera.  

joelmarklee

Okay, the story gets weirder.

I deleted the weird camera and added a new one.  I had been playing around with depth of field, and I can reproduce the disappearing hair issue by setting 'Depth of Field' to 'On'.  I have yet to reproduce the disappearing textures.

This has to be some kind of weird glitch, right?  

BeeMKay

Can you post a screenshot of the complete preview window and the camera settings?

Sometimes, the preview doesn't look very much like the rendered image. I don't think it is a glitch, though I am not at my PC right now to show what I mean.

BeeMKay

I've had time to look at this at my PC, and it seems to be a problem ove the overlay that shows you where the blurry section begins. I'm not sure if this is a bug and needs to be reported, though.

For better visibility, I have set the colour of the DOF plane to blue here. As you can see, the hair starts vanishing from the point of where the DOF plane is.

If my character is completely inside the DOF area, the hair is completely invisible.

In the "Display" section, you can see that the visibility is set to "on". That is the default setting.

If I switch "Visibility" to "Off", the plane vanishes, and the hair is vi´sible again.

Here's a view from the viewport, with the camera selected. Visibility of the grid: ON

Visibility of the grid: Off

The render itself doesn't care if the visibility is on or off:

 

mjc1016

It looks like you are running into OpenGL transparency limitations...