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[Black_Bart_GA]

Hi Guys,

I hope I can give you enough information to help me. I'm a definite newbie. I have been modeling an all polygon skull. Everything was going well until this morning. I had rendered several high resolution Mental Ray renders with Ray Tracing, and Final gather...no prolems. It was slow to render but I was very pleased with the final render: See the images on my website:

http://www.swallowdynamics.com
1. Good Mental Ray Render
2. Bad Mental Ray Render
3. Bad Maya Software Render

Next thing I know, I come home from work and try another render...without changing render globals or other settings as far as I know. The Mental Ray render came out corrupted. The Maya Software Renders are much better but I can see problems too. I have reset all defaults, optimized the scene, deleted history, tried to reduce settings in Global Renders....I don't know what to do. I am really going crazy trying to sort it out.

I am using Maya 6
P4 2.4 Ghz
1028 Mb RAM
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 8x AGP (current drivers)

Never had a problem for the last 2 weeks until today...I tried the render diagnostics. Sometimes it shows errors and sometimes not...inconsistent. The last said: RCF6 0.3 Warn 542002: angle between normal and geometry normal more than 90 degrees. It also says something like the selected rendered space is too small in the status/ script bar.

Any suggestions?

Black_BART_GA

[Black_Bart_GA]

It happens often I suppose, but I was tinkering with render globals, and preferences, and light / shading properties and in the midst fixed the problem. Only problem is I don't know how. If anyone checks out my posted URL in the original post and has any ideas of what went wrong, please let me know in case I do it again.

I really appreciate having a forum like this one....makes me feel not so helpless while trying to learn the basics.

Thanks Guys,

Black_Bart_GA

[Black_Bart_GA]

Just in case any more newbies like my self run into the same problem, I figured it out. The same corruption happended today. I discovered that the light in my scene was checked for dmap shadows....my render globals were set up for raytrace shadows. I changed my light to ray trace shadows and problem solved. I guess you learn these things through trial and error.