Where do my rendering artifacts come from? When rendering I get unexpected artifacts that somewhat look like artifacts caused by double meshes (Z-depth problem).

I am using Blender Internal. The scene/meshes are not complex at all. I experimented with render settings as well as light and world settings, but the artifacts are there whatever the settings. Even when rendered without shadows or any other "extras". The only setting that seems to change the appearance of the artifacts is the tile size.

I have double checked and am sure there are no double meshes in my geometry in object level or in sub object level. The normals are facing outward as they should. The meshes are not complex and clean.

I include rendered images here.




You'll find the .blend file here:

blend file here

I use:


Windows 7 64bit
Blender 2.70
ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series graphics Card with latest driver


I have searched Blender forums and learned that my graphics card was not the best choice for Blender... but as far as I know it should work well with the Internal renderer for CPU renderings.

So what causes the artifacts? How do I know if it's the graphics card causing it? Is there anything I can do about it or do I have to buy a card more suitable for Blender?

I noteiced two detailes that may be a hint...


in perspective view the scene looks "clean", as it should, but when I change to camera view it appears messy.
I am not confident about the unit settings. I was trying to work in centimeters, so I set "metric" and a scale of 0.01. But now the camera settings look unnormal: Focal length 0.28mm, sensor size 0.4mm...
It's due to your camera lens start clipping setting. It's set to 10µm (micro-meter, = 0.001 Blender unit).

For some reason Blender can't render surfaces correctly when the camera's clipping start distance is too low.

Try with some higher value, (e.g. 10cm = 10 Blender unit) and the problem is gone. Select the camera, go to camera tab in properties window, Lens panel: