Fog light misbehaving - fog shadows disappear
 

:banghead: I have a fairly large scene made in Maya 4.03 where a hole opens in a surface and a fog light (spotlight) shines through. When I first make it, everything works fine, and I get a nice coloured fog beam shining through the hole in the surface.

After a few changes to other parts of the scene, I find that the fog no longer takes any notice of the surface or of the light colour, and I just get a white cone the shape of the spotlight beam.

I've tried deleting the light and making a new one, but that doesn't work. I've checked that the shadow casting and receiving properties of the light and the surfaces involved are switched on. The light does actually cast a shadow, it's just the fog that won't co-operate.

The only way I've found to get out of this problem is to go back to a version of the scene saved before I put any lights in and start again from there. But I've done too much work now to go back that far, and I promised the client a rough render today...

Please, please, can someone tell me how to fix this.

Hmm... Quite odd... Tried exporting everything else but the lights to another file and then create the lights again?

what were these other changes?

Did u rescale the spotlight at all??

:banana: Hi guys,

Thank you so much for your help.

First of all, I discovered that I had been working on the wrong scene! Eight hours struggling with it, thinking that something had gone wrong again - AAAAGH! So I managed to get the job out, although it was an all-nighter.

The scene causing the trouble was one where I had tried to do some light linking and got it disastrously wrong - hence the strange fog lights.

Exporting everything except the lights did solve the problem with this scene. I deleted all the lights and exported the rest to a new file, and now fog lights work properly.

To quote Benny Hill: "Learning all ze time".

Alex: is there a reason not to scale spotlights with fog? I find I have to do that to get the fog to go far enough down the light beam.

Thank you again, both. I'll know how to get out of that one if/when I hit it again.

Julian