3ds max won't render

[lhg07]

I just downloaded the new 3ds max design 2011 and I can't get it to render or take materials for the life of me. The 2010 version had no problems and I don't know if I'm missing a setting or something. I hope this is an easy fix, can someone please help?

 

Every time I add lights the renderings come out all black. Without lights, they hardly take materials from the material library unless I use the asset browser. The viewport perspective is all black as well unless I put it in hidden line. Please help

[Cad64]

You just downloaded it?

Trial version or purchased and downloaded from the Autodesk site?

 

What renderer are you using?

What type of lights are you using?

 

Lights don't have anything to do with materials, so I don't know why you would have problems attaching materials regardless of whether you have lights in the scene or not. It shouldn't make any difference.

 

Not sure why your perspective viewport is black either. Maybe you need to uninstall and re-install.

[lhg07]

I have no idea what type of renderer I am using. I'm not even sure where that setting is. My lights are just photometric free lights. I never had a problem with it before when I had max design 2010 and now that I downloaded the 30 day trial of 2011, its giving me so many issues.

 

The materials have started taking to the blocks now. 'm not sure why they wouldn't before. However, the colors don't render as vivid as they appear in the viewports.

[Cad64]

You don't know what renderer you're using?

How much experience do you have with Max?

 

If you don't know how to choose a renderer then you must be using the Default Scanline. This is probably what's causing the problem. Switch to Mental Ray and try rendering again. You can specify your renderer in the "Render Setup" dialog > Common tab > Assign Renderer.

[lhg07]

I've been trying to mess around with the render settings to try to get the lights to work, but nothing will make my lights illuminate when I try to render. I don't know what else to do. Are there basic settings to show photometric lights?

[lhg07]

It already was set to mental ray renderer. I'm not a master or anything with Max, but I've produced some awesome renderings with my old 2010 version. But I had a professor set it up for me initially so I guess she just set everything as it needed to be. I don't know those little details

[Cad64]

Can you zip and post the file here, or upload it to Rapidshare or something?

[lhg07]

http://rapidshare.com/files/427428471/New_Compressed__zipped__Folder.zip

 

 

The file was too large as a zip file so I went onto rapidshare. Iv'e never used it before but it gave me a link to download so it is posted above. Let me know if that works or what I do to make it work from rapidshare. Thank you

[Cad64]

I've taken a quick look at the file, but I'm at work so I can't do much with it right now. I will look at it again tonight when I get home.

 

Oh, and the reason I wanted you to zip the file was so the materials would be included. When I try to render I get errors about the missing map files. When sending files you should use the "Archive" feature. It will create a zip which contains all the assets related to the file.

[Cad64]

I don't know. I've spent about an hour with your file but I cannot get it to render. I can open a new file, drop in a photometric light and it renders fine, but when I switch back to your file and try to render, it just comes out black. I've tried everything I can think of but it just won't render. Sorry.

[lhg07]

Do you think it may have anything to do with the fact that I am modeling in autoCAD 2009 and then file-linking it into 3ds max 2011? Do you think if I had a newer version of autoCAD that it would render? The same thing happened when I tried creating some blocks in max before I linked the file. everything worked just fine. Then it wouldn't render...

[Cad64]

That shouldn't be an issue, but if the problem occurred right after you linked the file into Max, then I guess there must be a problem with the Autocad file..

 

Run an AUDIT on your CAD file to see if there are any errors.