You’re welcome, Geoff.
Thanks for the feedback. MIP (initially) or SAT, is an option to avoid background flickering. No idea how you could have gotten a clear image at any time, if these setting were set, and perhaps too high. My tip: if you want to have the texture blurred overall, do it once to the linked image (a copy of course) otherwise you pay with render-time.
I hope replicating the problem has helped to filter out the area that caused the un-wanted result. I do not asked to be right, just to collect data what has worked.
Team render, Besides that 16.050 had updates about it, Rick also provided a new addendum to his series about problems after updating.
To speed up the process, as render-farms vary heavily, you might get instantly in contact with the support.
Have a great weekend
P.S.: I have made tests with the specification you mentioned. Well, hints—more or less. To get the MIP/Sat setting to compromise the Alpha channel you need to get really high values. As the Alpha channel is independent from other channels (in MIP/SAT/etc) settings, I don’t really get the idea to dial that value up as well. Again, how that shows up in DOF renderings in focus and then completely blurry is not clear to me. Values of around 100% (!) really destroy the transparency of the Alpha texture (if I set it for tests in that way) in my example. Hence my initial input to check if the transparency area has really black (zero) values. It can’t—of course not. So the initial question/headline is misleading, just to clear that point for every reader of this thread.
However—I’m glad that theme has been solved and the problem source has been spotted. :o)
