[3DSM] Weird shadows with common renderer, skylight and light tracer.

Moniek

Hello guys.

I am having some trouble with rendering my model. I am making a house and just finished the UVW map. I would like to make a clay render and use that technique to bake a nice base to start my texture with.
The technique I use is a very simple common renderer, white skylight and Light Tracer as advanced lighting.
I've used this method many times before and always worked fine.
However, the moment I put the skylight in the scene and activate advanced lighting I get heavy black shadows on my walls, while the windows stay beautiful white.
The whole project is 1 big model, I attached everything together before I started the unwrap UVW.
When I try to change lighting settings, smoothing groups, attaching/detaching things things only get weirder.
Can anyone please tell me what I'm doing wrong?

*edit: images were not showing

Plain model:


Model with skylight, default scanline renderer and light tracer:

Butthair

Pictures aren't showing up.

Moniek

Weird, I uploaded them somewhere else, should work now, twice

monster

Have you tried disabling backface culling to see if you have flipped normals?

Moniek

Backface cull didn't make any difference. It seems like there is a heavy gloss on my model but the shadow won't go away when I try different materials.

Butthair

Have you a standard material applied?

You said you were doing a clay render bake, are you baking this to a texture? Or is the shot you posted just a render?

I would check the vertex normals. Throw on a Edit Normals modifier, change the length so that you can see the normal line to each vert (sometimes they are very long and looks like the model has spiny hair).

If they're still all pointing outward, try exporting the model as an obj (specifically, dont do an fbx). Restart 3dsMax (close it, and start it up again) then import it into a new scene. Try your lighting method again.

I'm at a loss if those won't fix it.

If you still have a problem with it, I'd be happy to check out the model myself to see any issues.

Moniek

I had the standard material applied yes, nothing fancy.
Those images in this thread are just quick simple clay renders to show you the shading problem, but my goal is to render a clay-like render-to-texture for the shadows.
I tried baking a texture with these weird shadows but 3DSM keeps crashing when I try it on the old fashioned way (skylight, light tracer, lighting map).
I tried with mental ray and Ambient/Reflective Ambient Occlusion and that worked only on the bigger UVW parts.
I tried exporting to .obj and that fixed the weird shading part, but now my viewport model is pitch black and my UVW map is reset (yes I did check the box to export these), and when I try to load my UVW map saving the program crashes again.
I'm exhausted.. If you're interested you can PM me your email and I'll mail it to you.

Moniek

Ah well I'll just put up a link in here:
http://www.filedropper.com/sewinghouse09forpolycount_1
That's a part of my model, without any special rendering, lighting, whatsoever. The model does however have an UVW map and smoothing groups (which are acting weird again).
If anyone can find out what's wrong I'll be very happy to hear it

Butthair

Hey, got a bit busy or else I would've pmed you.

I'll take a look at it tonight when i get home

Butthair

Your normals are all kinds of weird.

Throw an Edit Normals modifier on it and down near the bottom of the menu click Reset.

Fwap

Are you using Max 15 by any chance?
I've never had these problems in 14 but in 15 they seem abundant.
Its a bit hit and miss sometimes, to fix it.
I either have to go in a fix the normals, or i just add an edit poly modifier, triangulate and undo, seems to fix it most of the time.