What do these warnings mean?

warning: Invalid surface normal (0 0 0) for "object", using geometric normal.
warning: Invalid texture derivatives (UVW 1.#QNAN, UVW 1.#QNAN, UVW 1.#QNAN).

I’m getting these warnings with one object in my scene and I haven’t been able to find any threads on the board referring to either one. Can someone tell me what kind of problem this indicates? I’ve made sure that I have defined UVW coordinates for all the faces of the object, but that hasn’t solved it…

Thanks!

Shaun

p.s., I just upgraded to 1.47.02 -- shame on me for not including my version in the first post!

a normal of 0 0 0 seems to imply a polygon that doesn’t have any surface area…

mabye throw a STL check on the ‘object’ and see what pops out.

They mean what they say :slight_smile: In the first case, VRay encountered an interpolated normal that has zero length. This can happen because of the way 3dsmax calculates surface normals. This was a cause for some shading errors (red dots etc) in previous versions. You should try to inspect the buggy mesh - welding vertices that are too close together may help.

The second error is probably related to the first.

Best regards,
Vlado

Much obliged, I welded the surfaces together and redid my UVWs… somewhere in there the problem went away. Thanks for the info!

Shaun

Yes, it is always a good idea to select all your vertices at the end and click Weld Poly with 0.1 thresh so you can have a clean mesh at the end. :slight_smile:

I am getting similar warnings: how do I determine exactly which mesh has a problem (my scene is many many thousand meshes!)?

The warning says which object caused the problem (in the example above, the name is “object”).

Best regards,
Vlado