I am working on an animation piece which makes use of referenced rigs. Earlier today VRay wouldn’t render the scene as it said all the materials were overbright. I did some research and it turned out to be a bug by VRay where on scenes with referenced files it bumps the light’s intensity to infinity. I corrected this and it rendered fine.
The problem is it keeps on doing this and I don’t know how to avoid it in the future. I am worried that if I send it over to a render farm it simply will render incorrectly and waste a considerable amount of money.
I know there was a little issue with vray4maya concerning the lights, I thought it was fixed by vlado, but perhaps the bug is still present:
If you load a vray-scene and maya forgot to load the vray-plugin (and we all know maya often forgets every single plugin you have …), light intensities went to infinity.
Somewhere in this forum I found a work around that fixed that issue for us:
Try adding the following line to your C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MayaXXXX\scripts\startup\userSetup.mel (or create the file)
Hello! Our group ran into this issue recently and found another workaround/ reason it was occurring, if anyone is curious. (we’re working off a student license… I hear it’s been fixed in the newer non-edu updates) Essentially, we found that what was causing this was any light that was set to a unit other than default would turn to infinity, but all lights set in default units retained their values. Again, this only happened on lights referenced into other scenes that would revert to infinity upon re-opening. Feel free to work in lumens or watts or whatever, so long as you revert all lights back to “default” before saving and closing the scene. Hope this helps!
Hannah
Have you tried simply putting a keyframe on the lights intensity prior to referencing it in? Works for other referencing related issues in maya *sometimes*. Like Dmitry I reference lighting into my scenes with no issues either…
Hope this helps!