Mysterious Black Frames

[gradualepiphany]

For some reason, when I render out a sequence of images, (particle system defining a metaball object and then shaded) every time I render the sequence out there will be a few frames that come out black. If I uncheck "Frame Range", go to the bad frame and render it as a single frame, it works fine. This is getting highly annoying, as I have to render, slog through the frames looking for blacks, and then go back and individually render those frames again.

Anybody have any ideas as to why this might be happening?

thanks in advance,

|andrew|

[tallkien]

Ouch, reminds me of problems I used to have rendering particles in Maya. Not sure if its the same issue here but my solution there was to always cache the simulation to disk before rendering, especially if I was using motion blur. Might be because the renderer has to back up a frame and that throws the simulation out of whack. Just a shot in the dark but hope it helps

cheers

tallkien

[gradualepiphany]

the particles were cached right before the render sop, I actually figured out that the problem was that I was accidentally accessing one of my file sequences over the school's network instead of the local machine's disk. Our network was acting flakey, but when I fixed the file sop to read that sequence in from a local disk - no more black frames.

|andrew|