3DS Max elements get "swallowed" when rendering?

A.Kindu

Hello everyone,

So this is my first real post in these forums, and unfortunately its already a request for help.

I'm currently trying to model a low-poly oak tree. For this purpose I modeled the high-poly branches with "real" leaves, which I then wanted to use to bake the texture maps. However, whenever I want to start the rendering to texture process, some of the leafs simply seem to disappear. Here are a couple of screenshots to illustrate what I mean:



This is the branch with a plane in the background - I attached all the leaves to the branch and merged the two branches into one object.



This is the output I get when rendering to texture. The same things seems to happen when I drag and drop a material to the "merged" model of branches and leaves.

Is this problem related to the UV-Map? I'm really lost here. Thanks in advance for your help! :-)

Nicolas Lietzau

Obscura

Im not sure but maybe those leaves are facing backwards compared to the camera(plane)? So the texture renderer dont "see" them, so they dont get rendered. Have you tried adding a 2 sided material to the leaves, and re-rendering it then?

A.Kindu

Thanks for your answer! :poly121:

The problem is that I merged these leafs from the scene where I created them, so I simply don't know where the material is saved - Still in the other scene? If I apply the new material there, will it affect the "branch-scene"?

Mark Dygert

The material is carried over and tied to the object. In the material editor you should be able to use the "eye dropper" to click on the mesh and load the leaf material into the material editor. The material editor is just a work bench, a place that you can drop materials temporarily to work on them. If you get rid of them or reset the material editor they stay with the objects. The only way to get rid of them is to remove them from the objects and reset the material editor. It can actually be more of a pain to try and get rid of them, heh.

Synaesthesia

I haven't tried deleting a material in a while. Does Max still have stability problems after deleting a material, Mark? That action used to make it crash almost every time.

A.Kindu

Thanks for your help! The normals were indeed facing the wrong way. Selecting the wrong leaves and flipping their normals did the job.

Mark Dygert

If you get into more complex foliage, like a bush made out of planes you might want to check out a script called "Normal Thief". It aligns the somewhat chaotic normals of the planes to match a target object and it really helps with shadowing.