Texture Rendering Problems

# 1 07-12-2014 , 01:37 AM

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Hello all. I'm following a basic tutorial on modeling, texturing and lighting a living room in maya 2013 for mac. Everything's gone well until now: I have all of my (mia_x) textures set up in the display tab, but when I try to render with mental ray, my image textures don't appear. I've been troubleshooting for hours: the textures are the right file formats (TIFF), they're lined up well, my render nodes are all clear. My UVs are aligned. I'm not doing anything complex - just a simple living room (cabinets, sofa, hardwood floor, etc). I cannot for the life of me figure out what I'm doing wrong. The textures aren't black when rendered, they're just pale colours similar to the shades of the wood images I'm using. I've even rendered in 1kx1k dimensions - same problem.

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious - I'm just completely out of ideas. (I'm also fairly new to this, so sorry if the solution is stupidly simple).

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# 2 07-12-2014 , 01:50 PM

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Are you getting any warnings in the script editor or even your render logs? Have you tried a different file format for textures? I believe there were some support issues with tif and Mental Ray.

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# 3 07-12-2014 , 06:43 PM

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I've tried both JPEG and TIFF for all textures: no difference.

One error though:

// Error: (Mayatomr.Shader) : mia_material_x4SG: no shader assigned in material

I've checked the shaders, assigned and reassigned the right ones, but nothing seems to change.

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# 4 08-12-2014 , 12:28 AM

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Ohhh yeah I see. Somewhere along the line your mia_mat got disconnected from it's shading group. Mental ray won't render the surfaces using that shader because well, it has no surface shading information. Middle mouse drag it back unto the material channel in the shading group's attribute editor(under the "Custom shaders" section), it'll automatically make the proper connection. But if you care about the more technical side of things or are forced to do it manually, the attributes being connected are the mia_mat.message to shadingGrp.miMaterialShader. Hope that helps! user added image

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# 5 08-12-2014 , 07:06 PM

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You were right - they weren't connected. I got the right result:

// Result: Connected floor.message to mia_material_x4SG.miMaterialShader.

Unfortunately, my render still isn't any good. It's my first one, so I'm really happy with it except for the texturing issue - as you can see, it's affecting all of my image textures. They're all high res, and I was careful to map them properly .. Any more help would be greatly appreciated user added image

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# 6 08-12-2014 , 11:45 PM

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Hmm, well you could upload the scene somewhere and pm me a download link and I'll take a look at it.

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# 7 09-12-2014 , 09:39 PM

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Here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/90xiphbdrf...groom.zip?dl=0

Sorry if it's a little big - again, this is my first time attempting something like this. Thanks so much for your help!

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# 8 10-12-2014 , 01:16 AM

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First thing I noticed was the use of projections on your texture maps, which in this case is probably unnecessary and the textures were being cast onto the objects in an undesirable way. Check that you have "2D Normal" selected in the "Hypershade>Create>2D Textures" menu(sometimes 3D projection gets selected by accident) for future texture nodes. I just ended up dragging and dropping the textures directly unto the shader channel to overwrite the connection to the 3D projection node.

Then there was the matter of the objects UV layouts, a quick freeze transform and auto mapping as a base got rid of the severe texture warping happening on the entertainment stand for example. Even when the 3D projections were out of the picture, the warping was part of the reason why the wood looked paler than it should because the lighter parts of the detail were being stretched all over the surface.

A few other things I should add(because they'll probably bite you later), since the dielectric shader is old and in some cases problematic, you may want to ditch it for an mia_material_x. Then there is the wood floor, it isn't reflective because mia_mats have a setting under the advanced reflection called "skip reflection on inside" that is on by default and this dictates that only the side that the surface normals are facing will be reflective(my guess is for performance reasons), so either uncheck this or reverse the normals on your floor object. And last but certainly not least, check into using a linear lighting workflow because it's awesome and it'll set you on the right track to realism. user added image

Phew! That was a long one, hope it helps!

- Genny
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