Urgent! Lambert-based textures render as pure black

#1

Hi, I’m new to 3d and I’m currently taking a course in it for college, and our first assignment is due monday!

I have a set of textures using Lambert linked to jpg images, and are UV-mapped onto objects. I also have one blinn texture that is naturally black, but is reflective like a mirror. They render fine when editing the object, however,*

THE ISSUE: When imported into a scene containing a Vue landscape (I have Vue XStream installed) and rendered, everything renders fine including Blinn material except for the lambert materials. They are pure black. I also tried adding a seperate, new Lambert material within the scene and have it a plain color, still turns black.*

I have no idea how to fix this and I dont want to start texturing from scratch again, it took me all day!

A few notes: For XStream, I had to apply photometric things to the cameras, mia_photometric_material or something like that to the cameras, so that it wasnt over exposed with Vue’s sun. Is this the reason? why would Blinn material render fine then?

#2

Two things. First, try using all Blinns out of Maya instead of any Lamberts. You really don’t need the Lambert for much of anything, even with the old Maya renderer. Since the Blinn was working, just use that for now and reduce the specularity all the way to simulate the Lambert. This way you won’t have to rebuild any texture files, just recreate the shaders instead.

Second… Good luck with Vue xStream. It’s just terrible - buggy, unstable, and nowhere near as fast as Maya, period. When you get fed up with it, explore doing everything in Maya instead. Far more control, far faster rendering, and much greater accuracy. If you really like the Vue sky system (which I do), you can try out Ozone for Maya, which uses the Vue sky system directly inside Maya. It’s also rather buggy, so don’t expect miracles, but alternatively you could render out your Vue skies as HDR images for use inside Maya/mental ray.

There’s a huge “Forests in mental ray” thread here which should get you up to speed for landscapes in Maya. Good luck!