Had a brutal streak of failed renders last Wednesday

I spent six hours setting up a scene in Blender only to have it crash and corrupt the file. Rebuilt everything from scratch and got it to render overnight, but the compositing pass was totally black. Has anyone else had Blender just eat their work like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

simonl111mo ago

My buddy Dave had that same black compositing pass issue a few months ago. He rebuilt his whole project twice before someone told him to check if he accidentally had "transparent film" turned on in the render settings. Once he turned it off it worked fine, but he lost a whole weekend to that little checkbox.

the_max1mo ago

Dont blame Blender for your own lack of backups. You should have been saving incrementally every 15 minutes like everyone else does. The black compositing pass thing is probably just you flipping every checkbox in the render settings without knowing what they do. Ive had Blender crash on me plenty of times but I never lose more than 10 minutes of work because I save versions like clockwork. Maybe stop relying on overnight renders and actually watch the first few frames come through before going to bed.

the_sam1mo ago

Did you try checking the compositor nodes before you rendered? I spent a whole day once because I had accidentally left a viewer node connected to the composite output. It was showing a solid black frame in the render. Easy to miss when you're tired. Blender's great but it will happily let you shoot yourself in the foot with small settings like that. Next time you set up a render, maybe do a quick test with just one frame first. Saves a lot of headache. What'd you end up doing wrong?