I built a scene of a tram depot building with the surrounding yard and terrain.
I have another scene with a model of a tram, rigged to follow a path using the ToyTrain plugin.
I brought the Depot scene into the tram scene as an Xref. When I render the scene, some objects to the left of the frame don’t render correctly, a horizontal beam at the top, in the corner of the wall and ceiling, another on the wall at the 1st floor level, and a horizontal H section rail supported off from the wall. The beams are box primitives, and the rail is an extruded wide flange shape.
The objects appear to cast a shadow on the wall, but the beams only show a thin line where they intersect the wall (possibly AO), and on the rail, only the end cap H shape is visible, as if the extrude was set to 0.
Everything is present and correct in the viewport and everything renders as expected in the original scene.
I went back and collapsed everything in the Xref scene, it made no difference. I merged the Xref scene, that made no difference. I removed the Xref, and brought it in with Merge instead of Xref, still the same result. I thought it was an Xref thing, but it seems not.
Strangely, when the render does the FG pass, I can see the objects, but not in the render pass.
This is with Max 2010 x64 on XP x64.
BTW, you may also notice that the track is missing too, but that’s ‘cos I forgot to unhide it’s layer, nothing to do with this.

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Ive always been slightly suspicious of xrefs but since you tried merging the problem geometry and it’s still not behaving i’d say the problem is not with the xref.

The problem may be with the geometry. You could try deleting it and re-building it from scratch, and putting a basic default grey material on it to see if that works, then go from there and put the appropriate material on it.

Hope that works.

Jon

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try a few things when I get back to work, It’ bad timing really, I won’t be back there for two weeks.

The problem may be with the geometry.

Possibly, but the H section rail has an identical instance on the right of the picture that has rendered OK. The beams are just box primitives, collapsing everything to Emeshes didn’t help.

What happens if you attach the problem boxes to something else in the scene and merge all this again?

None of the problem objects are attached to anything, they are just placed there.
What I will probably do is Merge the scene, copy the good H rail and recreate the boxes, it’s not a lot of work. It’s just I was a bit puzzled by this.
I was using Xref because I wanted to use the same building in two scenes.
I intended on leaving the anims rendering while I was away. As it happened I submitted one as is, but didn’t have time to get it just as I wanted.

Sounds a bit like a bug I spotted a while back. If you hide part of a mesh using the Hide button on the modify panel, it’s visible during final gather but not rendering… or it might be the other way round, I can’t quite remember. Just thought I’d mention it in case it gives you any clues.