Hi everyone

I am still relatively new to Maya and I am encountering a strange problem, Hopefully some of the more advanced users can help me.
I am currently working through the tutorials found in “Learning Autodesk Maya 2008” by autodesk maya press.

When i go to make an IPR of my scene the render window comes out entirely black, regardless of using the default lighting, or placing any point or spot lights in the scene. i have checked every setting i can think of and as far as i can tell everything is set up correctly.

I have been saving sequentialy, and strangle enough, if i go back a few iterations, the IPR renders will come out fine.  I cant figure out what happened to cause my render to think that there are no lights ( or default lights) in the scene. Every setting is identical in both the files where my renders come out black and where they come out correctly.

Any insight on this matter would be vastly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

No advanced users have any idea how to fix this problem? I had many back up saves and was able to get around the issue by reverting to an older version of the file, but i do not want this to happen in the future.

hmm
did you turn raytracing on? (IPR can’t render with raytracing...)

any errors in the script editor?

n8skow [FA]

Thanks for your help.

Ray tracing is not on. At this point in the tutorial I haven’t even covered more advanced render settings , I am just trying to do a default IPR.

Here is the output from the script editor.

Rendering using 2 threads.
A default light has been created, modify defaultRenderGlobals.enableDefaultLight to change this behavior.
A default light named “defaultLight” has been added to the scene for IPR tuning.
Automatic near/far clipping values: 0.1, 4.34059e+013.
Starting Rendering D:/Documents and Settings/Ashton/My Documents/maya/projects/support_files/Canyon project/images/tmp/texture1.iff.
Constructing shading groups

Rendering current frame.

Frame triangle count: 59138
====================================
Resource Usage At End Of Frame
====================================
11164 Page faults
321.883 Mb Max resident size
324.598 Mb Peak total size(Estimated)
64.350 Mb Peak arena size
====================================
327.137 Mb Current
0.431 Mb POLY_DRAW_CACHE_DATA
35.625 Mb MEL
10.554 Mb File Texture Mipmaps
0.131 Mb arguments
0.625 Mb Data Blocks
0.125 Mb NURBS Surface Shapes
4.922 Mb Pixel Map
10.000 Mb Render Cache
1.000 Mb NURBS AG
0.125 Mb Keys
0.026 Mb Render Geometry Arena
0.124 Mb Transforms
0.313 Mb NURBS Geometry Cache
====================================
Postprocessing rendering result.
Time For Tessellation (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00
Time For Shadow Map (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00
Time For Post Process (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00
Time For Frame Render (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:04
Finished Rendering D:/Documents and Settings/Ashton/My Documents/maya/projects/support_files/Canyon project/images/tmp/texture1.iff.

------------------------------------------------------------

what ‘tutorial’ are you following?
can you attach your scene file so we can check it out?

n8skow [FA]

The tutorial is from “Learning Autodesk Maya 2008” by Autodesk press. It is a very basic modeling / textureing / rendering and animation lesson. 

Here are the scene files.  “Render error.mb” contains the scene where the IPR’s come out black.  “Render working correctly” contains the same scene after i reverted to a previous version of the project.

the forum wouldn’t allow me to upload the files as .mb. I have changed the file extension to .txt. I think they should still work if you change the file extension manually after download.

thanks again for your help.

	Attachment
10997_0EaIeUWGuZyiio8FovBz.txt

	Attachment
10998_jYYEUvGVuOLjM8KXfpck.txt

where is your light source? not seeing one in the hypergraph.
I also notice that it will render in MR - but is pitch black in Maya Software (though I can see an alpha channel) so it ‘is’ rendering… just black for some reason… hmmm

n8skow [FA]

I haven’t added any lights to the scene, so the light source should be the default lighting.

As I have done nothing to modify the default render settings or lighting, I am starting to get the feeling that something in the file may have become corrupt. Is this common when working in Maya?