Canvas not rendering anything
alex86fire
Posts: 1,130
in The Commons
Hi all,
I've been rendering some clothes with canvases and it worked out great.
Until I reached the https://www.daz3d.com/ajc-im-so-fitness-outfit-for-genesis-8-females set.
Somethow even if I have the clothes added in the node, the canvas renders empty like I would have nothing included in the node.
Any ideas what to do?
If I put anything else in the node selection, that part renders but whatever I do the fitness outfit doesn't.
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Comments
per chance you clicked on the eye icon in the scenes tab so it turnes invisible? do you see it in the preview?
I see it in the preview. If I deactivate canvases and press render, the suit renders fine.
What I did notice upon closer look is that it doesn't get a canvas folder. All the other outfits have a folder with the outfit name _canvases. This one didn't.
I can also tell you that as a wearable preset it occupies over 200 MB (second biggest is 47 MB).
I am thinking that maybe Daz is having trouble creating a canvas for it somehow?
Thats a dang lot for a set that hardly covers much skin LOL
I'm not that familiar with canvases, what you could try is to render only one piece eg only the pants of it to see if that works in the layer, and than add the next. that would give you an idea if it might be the shere size of it or some other trouble.
Are you getting a black render? What exactly is DS doing when you try to render with canvases?
Since I am using the Alpha checkbox I am getting a beautiful nothing.
That was a good idea. Unfortunately still nothing, even with just the pants, or just the top. Again, if I uncheck canvases, I can render the fintess suit just fine.
maybe make a screenshots with the canvas and scene settingy you're using?
Yes please. A screenshot of your canvas settings might help to pinpoint the problem.
Here they are.
Why I don't think it's anything to do with the canvas setting is the fact that I rendered 20 other outfits with no problem, but who knows.
It gets even weirder:
If I render still with canvas but select the girl as well, I still get transparence where the outfit should be.
I am now sure there is a problem with this outfit and canvases,I just couldn't say what that problem is.
I do not use canvases in that way. I render entire scenes and use the nodes for lights. Unfortunately, I do not have this specific outfit so cannot test it to see if I get the same results.
Have you tried looking at the surface settings? Maybe compare them to an outfit that you have been able to render sucessfully to see if something may be different?
I thought about that.
I applied a totally different shader to both pants and top - a simple fabric shader from a shader pack. Unfortunately no difference.
I am doing it like this with canvases because I want to be able to compose the images. So I can combine the character with different outfits. Canvases is the perfect way to do so.
Maybe someone has this outfit and can give it a try. It's good that it's not something that is blocking me, so I can wait a few days for a result.
Have you tried looking at the log files comparing some set that renders in the canvas and this one?
Try giving this to the support team as well, since it seems not many people who own the set also have experience with canvas, It might be a real but or they might find waht else was wrong
(they have more experience reading log files as well)
I actually did try reading the log files as well :).
Sometime after you guys started giving me advice I thought of looking at the log and maybe copying some of it here but there was nothing out of the ordinary comparing the 2 renders.
Only thing I noticed but couldn't find to turn off was Iray Optix Prime not supported anymore :).
I will try to open a support ticket, it might be the best way to solve this.
Sorry I couldn't help more, hope they find a solution for this peculiar thing
Good luck @alex86fire. Thank you for giving me a new way to use canvases. I wish I could have helped more as well.
Thank you both for giving it a shot!
I look forward to seeing what result I get from Daz and will come back here and let everyone know what the fix is.
Is the outfit a GeoGraft - if you hide it, is the figure underneath visible?
The figure is visible if I hide the outfit. Not sure if this means it's not a geograft as I am not that familiar with the notion :).
From description: https://www.daz3d.com/ajc-im-so-fitness-outfit-for-genesis-8-females it doesn't look like it is a geograft.
What happens if you just do a Bearty Canvasl with nothing selected? Does the item show up, or is it invisible? How is it with the alpha channel unchecked? You can do quick tests by spot rendering to a window. The only times I've seen that kind of behaviour is when my selections involved instance groups, which I don't think is the case with this item. I'm kind of full up on exercise clothes, so I didn't pick this item up myself, although it looks pretty interesting. Besides, it didn't come with shoes or anything else that would have been fun.
I usually include a Beauty canvas with nothing selected as backup when I render, even though I rarely use it. That way I always have at least some kind of image of everything.
Beauty Canvas with nothing selected(nodes: none) with alpha channel is a transparent image. Without alpha channel is a black image.
Beauty canvas with the fitness items selected and no alpha channel is also black image.
Canvas without alpha channel and just mith my character selected and not the clothes yield an interesting effect where it's like she's dressed in the suit and the suit is all black.
What exercise clothes do you have for G8? Maybe I can add more to my wardrobe.
That's pretty weird. If it wasn't full price, I'd be tempted to pick up that outfit, because I like the top. Maybe there's a way to take advantage of this? A line of vampire clothes that can't be captured digitally?
My G8 stuff is all of the yoga variety, like the Tek Athletic and Jenna Workout outfits. Don't have actual shorts, other than maybe the ones from the Snuggles Outfit that are of the sweat fabric variety.
It's weird that it's full price already. I bought it as one of the 2 items that gave a future discount for the then unknown Josephine bundle. Maybe it will be included in a catch-up month or something.
One word of caution, depending on your PC, it is pretty resources intensive. I think that it might be the reason Canvases fail.
I attached a screenshot with the suit, both at base geometry, mesh smoothing turned off.
After some more tries and playing around I found one workaround: export the suit as obj and reimport it in the scene.
It then appears to be able to be rendered on canvas. not sure what that means.
Well, if that's the result, it hardly seems worth the trouble. You pretty much lose everything, like the mesh insert and the nice textures, that made the product worth buying to begin with.
That was just a fast reimport and I used a regular shader because I imported the whole suit so I couldn't use the materials.
If I don't find the right solution I will import normally and map them properly.
The problem was when I autofitted the outfit it went crazy and didn't fit at all anymore, so with this solution I can only use it in one position per import. That's why I didn't pursue it further yet.
So this has been keeping me awake (not really) and I thought of something you can try!
Make a Beauty canvas with no selection, which is always good practice for oops control anyway.
Put a plain white shader on the garment. Make a spot render Beauty canvas with only the item selected.
Use the garment canvas to create a mask.
That way you'll know if it's the shader or the garment.
This PA has another item out which caught my eye, I wonder if that has the same issues.
I also like the other garment as well. Looks really well made and modern and the jacket has open morphs which are always nice.
I didn't really understand this part: Make a spot render Beauty canvas with only the item selected. Do you mean add the garment to the node but onyl the garment?
What is the beauty canvas with no selection for? I don't know what oops control is.
What about the mask? Do you want me to try and make a canvas with the above, name it accordingly, put it in a correctly named folder and try like that?
You should always make a general beauty canvas, both for reference and as a resource. Oops control is like, say you have 3 lights and, for whatever reason, one of the canvases is blank, or you have the wrong node or whatever. You can subtract the two other canvases from the beauty canvas (Subtract blend mode) to get the missing lighting. It's just insurance. Delete it later if you have no use for it, but there's zero additional cost involved in generating it, so it's silly not to.
What you want is a layer showing a garment and a mask layer. The beauty layer includes the garment. If you want a layer with just the garment, you need to mask it out of the layer with the garment.
I don't know if using a different shader will work on the garment. I don't own it.
Here's what I mean.
You have your regular all-purpose Beauty canvas.
Then you have a canvas where you select everything but the problem garment. You end up with an EXR file that looks like this out of the box
You invert it to get this, and then Rasterize it to Mask
You use that to mask the beauty canvas to get
And walla, you have a layer with the garment to have your way with. And yeah, you'll need to do a little more work on the mask because the edges are jaggedy, but that's masks for you.
I was thinking of maybe trying to name the mask with the canvas name for the garment, put it in a correctly named folder and see if somehow it allows me to render to canvas the garment, instead of getting it out of photoshop (Gimp for me).
Right now I am in a a 8 hour render so I can't try anything out but once it's done I'll give both methods a try, see what I get.