Shadow glitch with CC 2019 update

[flickfinity]

After updating to After Effects CC 2019, I noticed issues with my shadows as well as performance. There seems to be grainy noise when I have more than one layer casting shadows on my floor layer. Moving each layer along the Z plane to offset them seemed to help a little bit but when I checked, this is not an issue in CC 2018 so I'm wondering why now. It also causes my computer to crash periodically when I try to preview the problem areas.

The scene is set up with 5 3d layers (4 text, 1 logo animation precomp), stack up above a white 3d floor layer. The point light is above and slightly behind to cast a shadow forward. There is a 2d background layer at the bottom of the comp.

I am using the classic 3d renderer, so no layers are extruded.

My specs are:

Video card - Geforce GTX 780 with 6GB vram

These are my questions:

1. Is anyone else experiencing this? (Specifically with a different video card.)
2. Does anyone know how to fix it? (I am going back to CC 2018 to finish the project but would like to take advantage of updates in the future.)
3. Adobe, has this been discovered as a know issue and will it be fixed or am I nearing the end of my hardware's life? (I can provide all hardware specs if necessary.)

Message was edited by: Joel York

[samantham35542376 · Accepted solution]

I am having the SAME issue in InDesign CC 2019! Trying to overlay text that has a drop shadow on top of an image, then the image becomes faded/grainy as well.

[Ziad Saad]

Same here. It does come from the 3D Lights Shadows. Glitch disappears when Shadows get disabled.

[flickfinity]

Thank you for your reply, I thought I was going crazy. That looks like what I am seeing.

My comp is 8 bits per channel. I noticed that when I changed it to 32 bpc the glitch changed to a white color. What color space is your project in?

It's almost like noise the way it moves when I render a preview.

[Ziad Saad]

Yes looks like a glitch/noise cluster in my project (32bit - sRGB). And you are right, they turn black in 8 bit.

Here is the "cluster" at 400%

[flickfinity]

I have been working with one of their engineers and it looks like they are working on it. Here is what he said...

Thanks for the project file. The problem is with high Shadow Diffusion value using the Classic 3D renderer, on Windows only. I also saw the crash a few times working with it.

I was able to repro the noise yesterday with just one shadow caster. In your project file the problem gets magnified by the 4 casters in the same Z plane. If you separate the text layers in Z, the problem is reduced.

Using the CINEMA 4D can be a workaround, but it doesn’t support Motion Blur and the Shadow Diffusion value needs to be adjusted for your specific setup to match the original.

We will have the problem fixed in an update, in the near future.

@Ziad Saad, can you confirm that you are also using Windows?

[Tim Kurkoski · Accepted solution]

This bug was fixed in the December 2018 release of After Effects CC (version 16.0.1). You can install this release via the Creative Cloud desktop application.

A list of bugs fixed in After Effects 16.0.1 can be found here: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/kb/fixed-issues.html

[oliverchater]

Hi,

I'm still getting these shadow glitches in 16.0.1.

getting lots of glitches like this:

that is just a 3d grey shape layer with a 3d layer infront of it.

also getting a lot of banding in the shadows despite having a 4000 resolution map:

Anyone else still experiencing these issues in 16.0.1?

[Tim Kurkoski]

ollie1695​, I asked one of our engineers to look at your screenshots. They believe that you're encountering a different bug than what is described in the previous posts in this thread (noise in the shadows) and fixed in After Effects 16.0.1. The bug you appear to be encountering (moire pattern in the shadow) can happen when the layers are very close together, and is not new to After Effects 16.0 or 16.0.1. (You should see similar results in older versions of After Effects with the same comp.) The workaround is to separate the layers further in Z space.

[oliverchater]

Hi Tim,

Thank you for your help so far,

Yes the moire is with layers that are close together, however i've only tried to do that to fix the glitching that is happening.

I have attached the project file so your team can look at it: https://we.tl/t-81v9KV4NGZ

Here is another example of the glitching happening. Sometime it is flickering like in this gif: WeTransfer

and sometime it appears far more digital (forgive the red!):

Weirdly on this project I've also experienced an issue with alphas, when i've tried to preview (or export) a video where the
"accept shadows" button is set to 'only', it is appearing both in the viewer and render as an opaque solid.

All help is greatly appreciated!

Ollie

[oliverchater]

Hi Tim,

Just FYI, the error stems from AE struggling to compute the comp even on very powerful workstations. I was able to get around this glitch issue on recent projects with some project optimization. 

At the level i was pushing AE, even speading the layers in z-space did not solve the glitches.

Best,

[Lapzze]

I am still having this problem and i have the latest version, i reduced the diffusion in the 2 lights i have and the problem got fixed, but now what will i do when i need more diffusion?

[Ziad Saad]

Sorry for the late reply, just saw it. Seems it has been fixed. Yes im on win10.

So thank you Adobe/Tim/flickfinity!

[erikt10465416]

Well, this might be unrelated, but I cannot render with any drop shadow activated. It freezes the render after some time and creates a corrupt file with my rendered video up until the crashing point, then black.

Windows 10:64