Maya hardware and software render settings problem

#1

Hello,
Please I’m having problems with maya’s hardware and software render. I’m guessing I didn’t get the right settings, I don’t really know. The main problem is that, in the perspective view it shows the correct color of the textures I applied to the character but in the render view the color becomes more white. I tried adjusting the lights, even turning them off but, it didn’t work. I can’t use mental ray because it’s killing my PC’s processor and ram and still render for several minutes. I still tried it though and it’s still thesame whitish color problem.

Please I really need someone to help me out with this problem, It’s frustrating.

#2

Hi,

What kind of material are you using?
Maybe your specular strenght is too high.

#3

Thank you so much for your reply,
I used both blinn and lambert materials then went to photoshop to texture them.

I tried turning the specular down, the lighting reduced to a more dull look and there was an improvement on the color of the materials but that faint look is still there.

But I tried a “Hardware render buffer” and it rendered correctly and accurately. Does that mean anything? Maybe after final rendering it’ll be ok? I don’t know I’m just saying.

#4

I am not surprised that the viewport looks different than maya software render. They are different shaders not to mention that the viewport renders directly with opengl.
Since you are using maya software it is not the rendersettings colormanagement since that is ignored by maya software. Do you have renderview setup with linearSRGB in the imagecolorprofile pulldown of the renderview colormanager interface.

One thing I noticed in your example renders is the the maya software render is faceted while the viewport and hardware renders are not. Why would that be?

While I’m at it I may as well promote the Visualizer for Maya, which works in the viewport and will give you very fast renders and high end results.
https://www.caustic.com/visualizer/maya/

#5

Thank you for your reply.
The first view isn’t viewport, it’s the default quality rendring. Unfortunately, viewport refused to work on my system (it just freezes the whole view when I select it) :frowning: maybe it’s a compatibility problem considering I’m using a 4gigram-AMD-500G-HP Laptop. I know it’s a bad product for maya, not to mention 2013 maya. I don’t have enough money to go for a better PC, so I gotta deal with this one yet before maya roasts the processor. I appreciate the link to the maya viewport visualizer but, I can’t use it because viewport don’t work on my PC.

I changed the render settings to linear sRGB and played with the color management settings a little… it seem to work in fixing the cloth colors but then the body will look very dull… Unfortunately the settings only have contrast and exposure, don’t think that’ll be enough to correct the color of the whole character.

Thanks

#6

Hi Lucifer,

Sorry for the confusion in terminology. To me viewport is a general term describing one of the 3D display windows in Maya.

You must be referring to viewport2.0 which is an enhanced viewport renderer mode built in to Maya. The Visualizer does not use viewport2.0. Visualizer creates its own viewport. So I suggest you try it. It may well do the trick for you and its a 30 day free trial.

Renderview’s colormanagement contrast and brightness controls are, I think, intended to do temporary look tweaking, not for final renders.
The imagecolorprofile pulldown set to linearSRGB boosts Renderview to gamma 2.2 which is necessary for viewing with linear workflow.

Im still wondering why one of your renders looked all faceted.

#7

Oh ok… Thank you so much, I’m going to try the visualizer.

It puzzles me too as to why the software render is all faceted. Maybe I need to read more about maya software render.

Thanx

#8

If the default quality viewport is smooth shaded then normally the Mayasoftware render would also be smooth. This may be the clue.
Is it possible for you to attach your maya scene? If yes you will have to zip it up because this forum doesn’t accept maya files.

#9

Here’s the file. Thank you so much. I sent the pre-kinned file because I’m not a professional, I’m a little ashamed of the not-perfect-but-that-would-do skinning… I feel I’m the least beginner on the CG animation artists’ list. Bare with me

#10

Hmm… This is embarrassing. I tried the caustic visualizer and it became worse. I think it’s my system. Check out the mesh first anyway.

#11

Im attaching a snapshot of Caustic Visualizer on my machine. Its working fine.
I didn’t realize it until now that Mayasoftware will not render a smoothed (hotkey 3) polymesh directly. You have to add a mesh->smooth to the shape node. You didn’t supply any textures so your character is all monochrome. The blinn material has its specular eccentricity cranked to 1.0 which will result in a extreme/strange specular highlight. I suggest a smaller value. Perhaps start with a default Blinn.

#12

Willanie you are a genius.
The problem is this: I textured my character using the “Default Quality Rendering” so all the tweaking of how my character would look was based on that render set. However, the maya render is only based on the “High Quality Rendring”. So, I was busy tweaking everything on the “Default Quality Rendering” while nothing was happening in the “High Quality Rendring” which the main render set considers.

After tweaking the textures on the “High Quality Rendring” it displayed exactly on the main render display. Solved! (thanks to you)

BUT, I got a another problem of system requirement because, after Mesh > Smooth shading the mesh the whole animation became intolerably slow. My question is, If I tricked the machine and make all the necessary animations before mesh smooth shading the character, would it backfire during production rendering? I mean crash my system or something like that?

#13

Its hard to predict what may crash until you try it I guess.

I know you said that mentalray is slow but it renders smoothed meshes without the need for a Mesh->smooth node.

Again you could try Visualizer because its crazy fast, it also does not require a mesh->smooth node and it has batch rendering with motion blur.

#14

Okay man, I’ll try it, thanks again… So much