Posted to Tumblr on 2018-07-22
Alright y’all, it’s story time, because I feel like I need to preserve the history of the strangest glitch I’ve encountered in Blender so far. I’ve been fondly calling it the “Cryptid Square” for reasons that should become pretty apparent.
The story begins when I was working on texture painting for this model, and since Blender’s texture painting tools are about as effective as trying to knock a building down with a small bouncy ball, I do my painting in 3D Coat. However, I occasionally bring work in progress textures back into Blender just to make sure everything looks alright with rigging deformation and all that. On July 11th when I did a quick test render, I spotted the Cryptid Square for the first time.
My immediate thought was that I somehow messed up the texture when I exported from 3D Coat, since that’s not just a dark face or something, the faces on his hat are huge; just look at the silhouette of the brim of his hat. The straight lines are the edges of the faces. When I went back to the 3D viewport, I saw that the Cryptid Square wasn’t there in the textured/material view, and that it only appears in rendered. So, it definitely wasn’t on the texture. Which was really odd, since I hadn’t touched the .blend files since I started texture painting, and it wasn’t there the last time I brought the texture back over into Blender.
Next, I assumed it was something going on with the shading. It’s not in the picture above, but I had a cell shaded material that was basically identical to the one I used on my model of Cadence. I debunked that quickly since it appeared darker than the shading should allow. The shading is just the texture only with a color multiplied on top, so basically somewhere is shaded or it isn’t, there’s very little gradation, and the Cryptid was in a shaded section. It got further debunked when I realized that it even showed up when the material was set to shadeless, so it being related to lighting was completely ruled out.
Somewhere along the lines, I realized that there was a corresponding light square on the inner side of the brim of his hat, which I don’t have a picture of and I can’t get one because, well… that’s spoilers. That would make a pretty strong case for it being a problem with normals, only the problem is the inside and outside of the brim of his hat don’t share geometry, the brim has actual depth to it. It was affecting two completely separate faces. I wasn’t using a normal map either, so it couldn’t have be a problem with that. Sooo, I had to rule out normals as well.
Now… here’s where things start to get spooky. I was starting to think that the file had just gotten corrupted somehow. It’s rare, but it happens, so it’s always good to have backup saves. I went back to one of my saves from a few days prior, but the Cryptid Square had retroactively infected my past saves for as far back as the textured material existed. I tried appending the model to a completely new save and recreating the material from scratch, but the Square followed it there as well. The Cryptid Square seemed to transcend my save files entirely. I started thinking it was something wrong with Blender Internal rendering in its entirety on my computer, so I uninstalled and reinstalled Blender, but alas, the Square was not deterred.
I was becoming obsessed with this thing. I wanted to just continue texturing in hopes that it would disappear as abruptly as it appeared, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wasn’t even upset that it was ruining my renders, I just wanted to know. I wanted to know what it was and what was causing it. Like a detective on the tail of a serial killer, I was on the fuckin case and I didn’t want to rest until it was solved.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure it out. Eventually I just had to move on. I finished the texture and rendered it shadelessly in Blender Cycles, which is what you see in the final product, since the Square only affected Blender Internal. I was sad I couldn’t use the cell shaded material like I wanted to, but at least the texture stood well enough on its own.
The story doesn’t end there though. I was telling this story to [deactivated tumblr user] since he’s the only other person I talk to who models in Blender a lot. Initially, he was just as freaking confused as I was, but suggested that I try to delete the affected faces and refill them in. AND IT WORKED! I WAS SUPER CONVINCED IT WOULDN’T BUT IT DID! The weirdest thing is that doing that in one file fixed it on all my back-up saves. I just… I don’t even know, man. The Cryptid Square seriously started to feel like some kind of sentient entity to me, one that wasn’t tied to any specific save but instead just resided in my computer, only to appear suddenly and then never to be seen again.
I may never know what the Cryptid Square was or what caused it, but it’s legacy will forever live on in my memory, and I at least know how to fix it if it ever returns.
Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from, Cryptid Guy Joe?
It's been years, and as I expected, this glitch still haunts my thoughts sometimes. Even with much more Blender experience I don't have even the slightest clue what it was. My only explanation is that Blender pre-v2.8 and Blender Internal were just delightfully cursed sometimes. Blender Internal's code was nearly as old as I am, after all. Rest in Peace, Internal. You were clunky as hell but damn good at cell shading.
I wish I wrote about some of the other Phenomenons I experienced in those days, but alas, this one is all I got. Good times, though. I look back on them fondly. :]