Shutter cuts disappeared when rendered

[theatre4jc]

I am working on a design for a historical building where I have been asked to light some statues on the walls. They have asked to see a concept of this so I have taken a picture of the wall that was provided to me and placed it on the wall. Then fixture by fixture I used shutters frame the statues. I did not go through all the steps to make the shutters visible in Open GL. Instead I used Fast Renderworks and framed each statue out. Time intensive, yes, but it worked for my needs. I got every fixture framed as needed. That ended my work for the day.  Saved and quit. 

 

Day 2, opened the file and selected every fixture, turned on (because I was doing this one at a time for render times the day before and they were off),  selected Fast Renderworks to quickly check everything, and no shutter cuts were visible. Quite literally nothing changed except turning on all lights. Going back and doing one at a time and no shutter cuts are visible. The Object Info Pallet is showing the shutter cuts properly. I tried adding in my Renderworks background and style that I always use and doing my custom renderworks and still no shutters. 

 

What could cause this to suddenly disappear? Is there a specific way to render shutter cuts in a custom rendering that I may be missing?

 

Unfortunately due to NDAs I am not allowed to share the file or screen shots which will not help in problem solving.

 

Using VW2021.

[klinzey]

Did you make any changes to the default instrument texture?  or import another fixture into the document?

Can you still the light, but not the shutters?

Did you turn on soft shadows?

Try using a gobo and see if it renders. Shutters and gobos are very similar to the renderer.

Try to copy and paste one of the lights to a new file and see if it works in a new blank file.

[theatre4jc]

I did not make changes to the instrument texture before this problem started. I did, however make changes while trying to problem solve. I did import in a default directional light because I wanted ambient light off, but still needed some light to model the house lighting.

I can see the light but it has black specks throughout it in the render now. 

I have soft shadows on.

I cannot get gobos to render

I have tried copying and pasting into a new file and still a no go. When I did this I did not include the directional light. 

 

One thing I learned and did in my problem solving was figure out how to see the shutters in OpenGL. I can get this to work, however that will not help in the end because I need to show a full render. 

 

What is really confusing to me is it worked one day and then day 2 it didn't.  Maybe I should try this in VW2020 and see if the issue follows the version. EDIT: 2020 didn't add the shutters but the light no longer showed the black specks throughout the render.

Edited September 24, 2020 by theatre4jc

[theatre4jc]

Sorry for the multiple posts. 

 

Soft Shadows was freaking it all out. I turned off Soft Shadows for all fixtures with shutters and instantly everything rendered correctly.

[klinzey]

Yes, Soft Shadows needs to be OFF. Soft Shadows makes VERY soft shadows, not good at all for lighting devices.