shadow issue ?

[neko]

i have a very unusual problem, and i can't seem to figure it out.

 

i was just rendering a project from a few months ago, just trying out some different camera views. i didn't make any changes to materials, lighting or rendering settings.

 

the project is an exterior daytime render - during the final gather pass, i can see the shadows are being calculated, but when it begins the render pass, the shadows are not there.

 

i tried deleting the daylight system and the physical sky (i remember testing some settings for the background environment) and starting fresh, but that didn't help.

 

i then reset all the render settings to the preset MR exterior daytime settings and it still happens.

 

any thoughts ? i'm more than a little confused, but suspect it is something stupid.

 

cheers

[luckymutt]

What version of Max are you using, and are you using any Render Elements?

There was a bug in 2008 or 2009 (forget which) where if you had any render elements going then the shadows would not appear in the frame buffer.

The work-around was simply to also include a Shadow Render Element, they would then appear in the frame buffer.

However, this was fixed with a Hotfix or Service Pack for the version of Max this happened in, so make sure you are updated with whatever you are running.

[neko]

thanks - something odd must have happened.

 

i looked back in the 'autoback' folder and remembered that i had crashed out of the file last time i was working in it.

 

i used the last saved version, and without any changes it works fine.

 

very strange....never seen anything like this, and am surprised no one else has any ideas.

[jinsley]

Bizarre. I poked around with google and didn't find anything and nothing much over at the Area forum boards either... only thing that I read of is an old problem with the frame buffer, seems like some people have had troubles with this in the past in Maya with MR... do you have the same problem when you switch the frame buffer type?

 

or maybe the scene objects maybe all got switched to either cast no shadows or receive no shadows... although you can see them in the fg calculation so... ???

 

Can you post the scene?