I tried to render an image, but my computer froze whenever I started rendering it, forcing me to restart my computer. To fix that, I decided to separate my scene into render layers and render them separately. My computer didn't freeze, but the renders were 100% black. How can I fix this?
Which version of blender are you using ? In 2.80 you can check if the layer is used for Rendering as below:
In earlier versions (2.79 and below) you need to make sure each render layer you want to render is checked:
spikeyxxx This could have changed with latest build on 2.80 but I experienced the black screen issue with a 2.80 release lately.
spikeyxxx Yeah I didn't get the issue either on today's build (windows).
Actually the missing lights might actually be the problem, it happened more than once to me that I forgot to move the lights to a specific collection and then disable it :D
williamatics Hi William, thank you for suplying your .blend file.
I couldn't test it completely, due to missing textures, but one thing I did find, was that your subsurf modifier was set to 10 in the render. That is enough to crash a NASA computer;) No. but seriously, when I reduced that to 5, it no longer crashed. With a scene like this, you shouldn't need to render separate Layers. Also no more black renders in my testing Try it and let us know if it helped.
spikeyxxx Thank you for helping. It works! I thought that maybe 10 subdivisions wouldn't be so bad because it was fine when I was in rendered view in the 3D viewport, and because the faces were so large. I guess not.
williamatics Yes, but in rendered view it was only 4 subdivisions. 10 subdivisions is 2 to the power of 6 extra subdivisions, and that is about 64 times the geometry. You could use the Experimental feature in Cycles and use adaptive subdivision, but I think you don't need this in your scene. Anyway, glad I could be of help.
spikeyxxx I am sorry, but I wasn't thinking and I just need to correct this: 10 subdivisions is 4 to the power of 6 extra subdivisions, which makes 4096 times the geometry. because a mesh is 2 dimensional (bent in 3D space), so one square, subdivided once, makes four squares ( twice the length and twice the width!) and subdivided twice makes 16 squares and so on.