Ceilings render black with vue and mental ray...

[DarkenRahl]

I downloaded the PLE of vue xstream 10 to use with 3ds 2012. I got the skies and the trees to render, but at the cost of my building's quality.

 

I put a default material that was an off-white diffuse color based on the "Matte" arch and design material on every surface that wasn't glass.

 

I made sure the normals were facing out.

 

It still renders the undersides of any geometry as black. Almost as if there were no light reflecting from them at all. I have final gather enabled and have even tried it with GI enabled, all to no avail...

 

Any help would be much appreciated. The scene works fine without vue being enabled. I have tried disabling the vue final gather process and have monkeyed around with the physical lighting value in vue's settings...

 

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Hard to tell from the picture, but they don't look fully black. A little light from down by the horizon is getting up there. The verticals look very flat. My first guess is that you need to turn on some bounces. MR defaults to 0 bounces on the FG. (I'd think the GI would have fixed the problem so maybe I'm wrong).

 

Checking the faces is good. While you're at it, turn off backface culling, just in case. It's down there under Advanced Options, I think.

[DarkenRahl]

I have bounces set to 4 and the ceilings are still overwhelmingly dark. They do not match with the other elements around them, but instead look to be black or nearly so. They are the same material as everything else. I rendered with Force 2-sided checked and it did not fix the issue.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. Any others? Like I said, this ONLY happens when I enable vue and add their atmosphere and trees.

[DarkenRahl]

It seems that vue has a setting that tells it what its units are in relation to 3dsmax's. Unfortunately I have only gotten to change this value once without crashing, so I have yet to be able to test it out. I think that if the values match, it might fix the problem, because I remember that I had an instance of lighting not working right because I had imported my geometry incorrectly and my entire building was a foot tall.

[DarkenRahl]

That didn't fix it like I expected.

 

I also applied a masonry texture, and that is rendering as black.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks.

Edited May 21, 2012 by DarkenRahl

[donnholohan]

Hey guys Just wondering if anybody found out why this happens I also have the same problem - cant for the life of me find a solution

[Francisco Penaloza]

I just found this thread, in my website I have a work around to work with Vue within Max, it is a little updated on the version of Vue but the principles still apply.

hope this help

 

http://www.fco3d.com/?p=331