Hi, I'm a student at Savannah College of Art & Design.

Yesterday I was attempting to render an interior scene that I have modeled in Houdini 8 with Global Illumination. Upon turning the GI samples up on the vex gi shader, I noticed that I am getting some strange rendering effects on my scene.

The best way to describe the effect is that it looks like photoshop's cutout filter, or the posterize function in photoshop.

This problem just started occuring yesterday. The night before (two days ago) I rendered the same scene with no issues whatsoever.

I have no idea what is causing this issue as I am a beginner with houdini. Has anyone heard of this issue or seen this issue before? I am at a complete loss, and the worst part is that this project is due tomorrow.


The global illumination samples are not set very high but even when set to 250 or 512 the strange cutout gradient effect is still there…


I have went back to prior versions of my files and all seem to exhibit this issue now. I have no idea why. Also I have copied all of my OPS to a new houdini file and totally recreated the lights, SHOPS, etc and the issue is still there.

: I just figured out that if I save the render it apparently is perfectly fine. For whatever reason the image displayed in MPlay does not view properly… however if saved as jpg or whatever everything displays fine.


I am not sure what might have caused this. The only thing I can think of is I connected my Mac Book Pro to another monitor dual monitor setup.

Ive reset all of my video driver settings and the issue is still there… so I have no idea.

Hopefully someone has had this before.

Please help if possible.

Thanks so much.

Jonathan Moore