Mental Ray Rendering in Maya black?

dwgagner

I am attempting to render "smooth" meshes for a scene in Maya. Renders fine in Maya Software mode (but doesn't show smooth meshes) but when I switch to Mental Ray the render comes out black. All materials are Lambert, all textures are jpegs.

Joopson

"smooth" by hitting 3 with the mesh selected? That is only a preview for the viewport, and so Mental Ray isn't necessarily able to handle it. You'd have to manually smooth the mesh, I believe.

dwgagner

I'm using Maya 2012, supposedly smooth mesh is supposed to be renderable but only in mental ray. I've also tried rendering in Mental Ray with smooth turned off and it still comes out black.

dwgagner

Okay so for some reason if I load an ambient light into the scene it will render but all the spotlights I have will not render in mental ray, wtf.

dwgagner

Well I figured it out I guess, for some reason the materials I had setup do not work in Mental Ray, I had to delete them all, apply a flat lambert material to everything and now it will render fine in mental ray. -sigh

Crispy4004

You're better off sticking with the standard Mental Ray Materials anyways. Mia_X_Material_Passes should be your go to solution for just about everything that's not car paint or skin. Feel free to keep using those Maya Utility nodes though.

Daelus

Smooth mesh has been renderable since version 2009 with mental ray I believe. As for a black render, first thing, check your alpha channel to make sure it's actually finding the objects. Next thing would be to check the normals; if you have any negative scale values remember that will invert normals. Then switch out the materials, then the lights. Also, mental ray has it's own light shaders so you can try those out as well if it's still giving problems. You generally will get better results just sticking to mental ray shaders for everything if you render with mental ray (runs faster, with higher quality) so even if that doesn't solve your problem, well, it's good optimization.