Since installing 6.14 this week, I am occasionally seeing objects rendered in black. It is not readily reproducible, but has occurred at least twice. I think that the objects in question are defined with materials which include images from the library. It seems to occur during a session when changes are made to the model.
Given the difficulty in reproducing the problem at will, I have not included a sample file, nor images. I am hoping that in this case a description of the symptoms will be sufficient to help you.
As a work around, saving, closing and restarting reinstates the correct rendering.
The problem might be similar to this earlier report.
Hi Garry - if you can see a pattern - i.e., only your custom textures do this or only the ones installed with Rhino, or only very large textures, etc, that would be helpful. Also, the output from SystemInfo in Rhino.
Hi Pascal. From recollection, the problem relates to materials based on custom jpg images. I have attached some images of objects which have displayed as black. I suspect that the objects which I have seen are limited to polysurfaces rather than surfaces, but I might be wrong on that thought.
Hi Garry - I guess the first thing to try is to open the Notifications panel in Rhino (Panels menu).You should see a notification about updating the video driver - double-click on that and follow the directions to locate and update the driver… then see if things improve. Either way, if you have a moment, please report back with the updated SystemInfo after the driver update - we’re trying to keep track and see which ones work best for a given card.
Hi Pascal. Back to black. I have included more images below, with material details. As you can see, objects which only have a colour assigned with no associated image file are OK. The floor has been rendered as grey, not black. The black appeared immediately after a Ctrl S save while the model was in render mode on the perspective panel.
You will notice that in the materials panel, the colour swatch is also black, although hovering over the material name shows the correct colour in the 3D ‘eyeball’. For the floor material, the swatch shows as grey, not black.
The fact that the swatches in the Materials panel have lost their colours suggests to me that it is an internal Rhino issue rather than a GPU issue. Interested in your opinion on that thought.
Hi Pascal. Another observation. It seems that after the ‘event’ which causes the loss of the material information, a switch to a different view, such as switching from Top to Perspective, or switching from Layout Page 6 to Layout Page 8, initially displays the materials correctly, then after less than 1 second, the black appears on the screen.
Further to my earlier comment, it seems to me that Rhino is losing the material details for display in the Materials list swatch, and consequently in the model rendering, yet it is able to access the details for the dynamic display in the ‘eyeball’ when the mouse is hovered over the material name.
Hi Pascal. Another observation. This time within about 1 second of completing a Ctrl S Save, the entire Perspective view, the whole rectangle even the grid area where there were no objects, went black. The second image is what was presented after I switched to a couple of other views via the tabs at the bottom of the screen, then switched back to the Perspective view.
One of the views that I switched to was Layout Page 8, which contains 7 Details, each with rendered images. They each displayed correctly for about 1 second, then the materials which are image based went to black.
Once again, closing Rhino and restarting reinstated the materials.
Is there any way we can get your file to work with? Trying to reproduce this from scratch seems like a lesson in futility…so starting with something that we know has/shows the problem gives a much better chance of reproducing it, and therefore fixing it.
Hi Jeff. I understand the need for the file. It is too big to attach, so I have been trying to trim some elements. At the moment, I am not seeing the black images, but will keep trimming to get the file small enough.
Have a look at the image below. It is a mock up via MS Paint of another gremlin that I saw a couple of days ago. At the time, I did not capture an image. The black areas might not have been exactly as I have shown them below, but the representation is close. There were black blocks across a Layout page, blacking out areas which included active Details and unused areas of the page. Could this suggest that the problem is more likely to be due to my GPU than to a Rhino issue?
Highly unlikely… Rhino draws Page views by first clearing the viewport, drawing what it thinks is the “piece of paper”, and then starts sectioning off the page with each Detail…where each detail is then treated and drawn just like any other viewport. My guess is that something is going wonky during the “sectioning off” calculations, which can really mess up all kinds of things…it’s then possible that during the drawing of a given detail, that things get properly adjusted (i.e. corrected)…which could leave things half-in and half-out …depending on what is busted and how bad.
I appreciate your efforts to try to whittle down a smaller file…that can take a lot of time, and can also end up resulting in no longer being able to reproduce the problem…so again, I really appreciate what you’re doing.
Let me know if/when you have something I can look at.
Hi Jeff. I have had the trimmed file open for a couple of hours. I rotated the view a few times and finally found more black, as shown in the image below. Interestingly, this shows that the problem is not specific to Custom textures. Many of the surfaces which are black in this image have simple colour assignment without materials. Further, one of the textures has displayed correctly, as have some simple colours.
The file is now down from 85 MB to 30 MB. It is still to big to attach here. I could try to email it directly to you if that is OK at your end.
@jeff I have just updated to a later version of 6.14, and the black issue still occurs with the file that I sent to you. Keeping the file open for a while, then Ctrl S saving while in Perspective Render view seems to be one of the triggers, but it takes some attempts to get to the failure.
Something I’ve noticed is that you have a pitch black material in your scene…it’s being used for the baseboards around the center console, it’s called “Kitchen Cabinets Base”. To me it looks exactly like the material you’re seeing when all your other objects go black… So my assumption at the moment is that Rhino is somehow getting confused about which material is assigned to which object…
Can you please try this…
Once your objects start turning black…
Go into the materials tab and change the diffuse color for “Kitchen Cabinets Base” to something other than black (i.e. Bright green)
Rotate your view
Do all the black objects now draw with the new brighter color?
Hmmm… I just noticed that there are several materials called “Kitchen Cabinets Base”…so in your experiment, please try changing all of their diffuse values.
