An object wouldn't render in cycles (all solutions on the topic I found don't work) So I ran into a peculiar problem while rendering my scene in cycles. I am creating an animation demonstrating what a mental object cut is (when an object is cut by a plane). The pictures below show the sequence of my animation.

The setup is as follows:

(1) The initial object in picture 1 is the object I cut with an ambient occlusion material. The cross-section is a separate object hidden from scene view and render (same material applied). The cutting plane has a transparency node mixed with the diffuse node, and I regulate the level of transparency in Mix Shaders node.


(2) I gradually change the transparency level of the cutting plane to make it appear (by keyframing the Mix shaders node).


(3) At a certain point, I make the initial object invisible for the scene and render and toggle on the visibility of a pre-modeled cross-section object place right where the plane would actually cut the object.


(4) Finally, I toggle the visibility of the text object.


Now, in render mode my animation looks good. But when I actually render it, it the first frame looks like this (compare it to the first picture in my post):



The same thing actually happens in Blender Internal (which I desperately turned to having tries other things).

What I've tried so far:


Render visibility is keyframed on/off correctly for all objects(not only viewport visibility)
Duplication is set to none
Normals are set correctly on the initial object
changing normals on the cutting plane did not help
Blender Internal yields the same result
Starting a project from scratch did not help
After some manipulations with toggling the visibility on/off, I came
to the conclusion that the what happens is that the plane actually
visually cuts part of the initial object and what is shown in the
render is the second part behind the plane.


So what's happening here? I'd be very grateful if anyone could offer some insights into this situation. I am attaching the link to my blend file.

Thanks!
The cutting plane is somehow overlapping geometry and causing Z Fighting artifacts.

Your $Intitial$ object as a Boolean modifier invisible to viewport and visible to rendering leading to different results.

Your scene also as a multitude of unrelated issues like using Hemi lamps which aren't truly supported in Cycles and a Sun lamp which doesn't really seem to be doing much besides illuminating the background, since you are using an ambient occlusion shader on your objects which doesn't interact with scene lighting.