[DerickC]

I'm having a problem where all my scenes with either Image Based Environments or Physical Skies render fine in my Maya preview render, but not when I render using the Maxwell Network app nor on our render farm using Qube.

Any scene with just an HDR or a Physical Sky simply fails to render; any scene with an emitted light and an HDR or Physical sky only renders the scene with the emitted light - as if the HDR or Physical sky were disabled. I've gotten the same results in Maya 2012 & 2013, in Maxwell 2.6 & 2.7.20, on both windows and Mac OS 10.7 & 10.8

Old scenes that used HDRs or Phys. Skies work fine when I submit the old .MXS's to our render farm, but If I open the Maya project, and re-export, they fail. I've tried on multiple machines and multiple OSs.



Any help or troubleshooting advice greatly appreciated.
-Derick

[dariolanza]

Hi DerickC,

Check that your version of the Maya plugin and your Maxwell itself are synchronized to the latest versions (available from the Download Area).

It seems to be something in the way Maya is exporting the environment settings, that somehow your Maxwell is not recognizing properly.
This is why your plugin (including Fire) is interpreting it fine, but your Maxwell is not.

Perform all the tests with the Physical Sky, to remove the possibility of being a file import-export thing. Also perform the test renders with Maxwell in local (not Network) to remove also the possibility of a network transmission thing.

I guess that updating everything to the latest version would solve the issue.

Let me know if this fixes the problem.

Greetings

Dario Lanza

[DerickC]

I guess that updating everything to the latest version would solve the issue.

Thanks for the reply Dario.

I am up to date on both Maxwell Render (2.7.20) and on the Maya Plugin (2.7.8 ) I've tried exporting a test scene from Maya 2012 SP2 and Maya 2013 SP2 on Mac OS X 10.7 & 10.8, and from Maya 2012 SP1 on Windows 7 professional, both to no avail. (I was also having this problem with the previous version of MW, which was 2.7.10 if memory serves)

I've tried exporting a scene with just the Physical Sun & Sky and I get the same result: If there is no other light source, the render fails, and if there is another light source, only the non-environment light source renders. When I open the MXS up in Maxwell Studio, it shows no indication of the environment lighting, indicating that it is a problem with the export, but I don't know how to troubleshoot this further.

I have tried rendering locally through the Maxwell Render Node, as well as on our render farm through Qube, but I get the same results either way. IBL and Sun & Sky only render directly from Maya, even Fire crashes. (A likely symptom of the culprit, but I can't figure out the connection)

I've tried on 4 systems so far, all with the same results. It's one of the most perplexing issues I've run into, especially since I've successfully used Maxwell on several projects in the past. (those older files render fine when I resubmit them to the render farm; they are also using IBL) The only thing that changed between the old projects and this one is that I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, but that doesn't explain why this also fails to work in Windows.

Thanks,
Derick

[Mihnea Balta]

So let me see if I understand this correctly:

- if you export an MXS from Maya and open it directly in Maxwell, it renders fine.
- if you open that MXS in Studio, the IBL settings are missing, and rendering from there fails to show the IBL.

If this is the case, could you send me an MXS file and the HDR image you're using, please? My email is mihnea.balta@gmail.com.

[Reaversword]

This is happening to me too.

Fire shows IBL, but direct render don't.

Using last version of V2 and last version of the plugin, in Maya 2012, Win7x64


Hmmm... appears this behaviour is provoked by Alpha channel pass ON. This is not very normal, right?

[Mihnea Balta]

Turning on the alpha channel disables the background (sky, IBL etc.) because otherwise the background would pollute the foreground pixels, and the alpha channel would be useless. Since you have an alpha channel, I assume you want to overlay the rendered image on a different background anyway.

[choo-chee]

if it's network related you should check that the IBL file is available to all computers rendering.
I found that the best safe way is to just copy all my sourceimages to a folder with the same name on each computers thus maxwell always "thinks" that the scene file are on the original computer rendering ...