Import/referencing animation causes Arnold lights to not work

[Anonymous]

Hi!

I'm having an extremely irritating issue that for the life of me, I can't figure out. I am trying to create a render file with my environment and my animation referenced in. When I reference in the environment, everything is fine. As soon as I reference in the animation, I get the dreaded "errors have occurred while reading this scene that may result in data loss". I really don't get what's going on in the script editor when I check it.And then as soon as I open Renderview, about 50% of my area lights don't work. They're in the outliner, they just don't show up when I try to render.

I tried importing the animation, starting with the lit environment file and importing/referencing the animation from there, starting with the anim file and doing the opposite, and rendering the current frame. The same problem happens every time. The render is entirely unusable, you can't even see the animation.

The rig I'm using is Kyle by Josh Sobel, if that helps. And I already changed all the materials on the rig to AI.

I attached a renderview photo of what it looks like with and without the animation. All the mesh lights work, and some of the area lights. All the small ones basically. (Oh and I know the dome light needs an HDRI, that's next on my list)

[damaggio]

You got a bunch of mental ray nodes to delete, didn't you read the warning message?

You should focus first on rendering your environment as a still image, it needs a lot of lighting work and knowledge of the render engine before thinking of bringing any animation, that should be your last step.

make sure sure the environment looks good before continuing with the project.

Start by cleaning your file from all plug in nodes and mental ray nodes that came from the files you imported.

[Anonymous]

I don't know where to find those to delete them. Like I said, I didn't understand what the error message meant. How can I find those nodes within the rig file to delete them? Are they shaders or materials or what? I'm scared of deleting the wrong thing. Thanks!

[damaggio]

Select all the environment set and save as a new scene   .ma  then zip the file and Upload, no textures needed, someone

will delete the bad nodes for you.

Good luck.

[Anonymous]

I zipped both the env and the rig because I think the rig is where the issue is. When I reference the environment, everything is fine. And when I reference the rig (even without animation on it), the file goes crazy. Thanks for the help!

[mspeer]

Hi!

There is no change in lighting.

The whole scene is just very dark.

If you increased the Exposure slider in Render View, then referencing the character will reset this, but that's it.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

After like 5 hours alone, and 2.5 hours working with 4 other lighting experts, we finally found it. God knows it almost killed me, so if anyone has this problem: here's the solution.

The referenced settings from the rig were transferring into the assembly file and wouldn't go away when I unreferenced it. If you check the settings in Arnold Renderview, and the drop down menu for view transform is grayed out (like below), that will tell you this is your problem.

To fix this, go to preferences -- settings -- color management. Check the button that says "enable color management" (below image). Voila! It's immediately fixed. You may have to color correct your model, but it's not too bad. And to never fight with this again, go into the original rig file and check that box in the settings. I hope this helps some poor soul like me.