Did a test render and there are 2 small black blocks that didn't render. Any idea what might cause this?
Using hair with length, color and placement maps.

No idea, but just to see what happens , nudge the model right or left one nudge and see what changes.

hmm, nudged it over and they went away......

Now if you move it back....?

Maybe you hit on some one-in-a-million arrangement that made the renderer miss those spots?

those black dots are familiar - I thought they were related to # of passes somehow at one point? or a memory issue?

Never seen it before, only in the Beta. I also haven't been able to reproduce it again.
It reminds me of an animation job I was working on in Infini-D that took 3 weeks to render and when I played it back, one of the slaves would drop blocks. I never noticed until it was done because I took off on vacation at that time hehe

Worse case scenario is I can still render out of the old 32 bit version for upcoming jobs to play it safe.

It was dust on the emulsion.

Wow, that brings back memories. I used Infini-D back in the day. It didn't even have bones. Any mesh deformation had to be done on the vertex level.

About the black pixels, I've seen that in v14-v15. Most times, if you just rerender those specific frames, the dots will disappear. Sometimes, un-checking Multipass > Soften will get rid of the black pixels. Sometimes I would just have to paint them out. Painting frames is a hassle when rendering an animation, but it's doable. If you render foreground, middle, background in separate passes it seems to help. Also, it cuts down or re-render times too, since usually a problem only occurs on one of the render layers, and each pass takes a lot less time to render than if you render everything in one pass.

LOL dust... thought it was a hickey on the blanket (dust spec that lands on a printing press blanket)

This is the first time I ever had spots in a render in AM. I'm guessing that it is probably memory related like Nancy suggested.. Fresh brains on the machine before a final render wouldn't hurt I guess.

Infini-D was pretty tricky to model in..... everything was splines and all you had was extrusion or lathe. Booleans were only available in render time LOL.
Ever use Strata? I remember you needed to use the shift key and click to aim a light which was the same key combo for duplicate... 45min later I had a nuclear holocaust in my scene. These things only happen in rush jobs

I had both of those in the 90's. Modeling with those seemed to be mostly cobbling together primitives. So A:M was quite a leap forward with being able to make any shape and spline them together. Not that I got good at it very fast.

i've just rendered radiosity and caustics for the first time, my only lamp was a soft, dim rim light moving sideways across the scene. there's like a couple of dozen dead pixels dancing about on specular areas as the light moves.
15.0j+.

I have seen those artifacts as well sometimes in V16/64... solution was to render in 16/32. Sure is squirrely. Can you submit to A:MReports?

Click to view attachmentI had that happen to me when I made this. I painted them out with AE. Ill be it a bad work around.

Cool stuff Jason!

Had these artifacty before too... It seems like a very unlucky combination of things can cause them. Very hard to track down and very simple to get around. Just change for example the light property for a tiny little bit. That often gets rid of them. (intensity of 100% to 99.5% or something like that... will not be noticeable).

See you
*Fuchur*

Yeah... that is some great A:Mimation, Jason...

On the closeup screen of the computer monitors I see some lens 'barrel roll' effect... how did you achieve that?