Maya 2017 Rendering black screen with Arnold Renderer

[Anonymous]

Hi I would like to ask and get technical help if why is that when I render using the built-in arnold renderer in Maya 2017 it outputs only a black screen but if I use other renderers it is rendering properly. Did I miss anything or do I need to configure arnold before rendering?

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

Hi

What lights do you have in the scene? For a quick test, and an Arnold Skydome light (from the Arnold > Lights menu)

[ctedin3]

You could also try turning off "abort on Error" to see what is the problem. Sometimes it's disconnected textures, bad geometry, etc. This will flag the problem child.

[Stephen.Blair]

Or you could check the Arnold log for ERRORs

https://arnoldsupport.com/2016/07/22/mtoa-getting-an-arnold-log/

[Anonymous]

Hello all,

I am having the same exact issue.

I just downloaded my copy of Maya 2017 from autodesk.com It's installed perfectly, and started up fine the very first time. I created a sphere, and placed a light above it. I rendered this in arnold - got a black screen.

I added another light....at the side of the sphere, rendered in arnold - black picture again. nothing visible at all.

I decide to render using 'Maya software' - It renders fine, and shows me the illuminated ball. I came to this forum and saw someone above recommend Arnold skydome lights. I added that, and placed it above the sphere, still arnold renders a black picture.

Please, what do I do to fix this?

I watched a Maya 2017 official clip on youtube, and it said with global illumination, Arnold would automatically render a well-lit object with no tweaking...

[Stephen.Blair]

Hi

What kind of light? 

Did you adjust the intensity or exposure of the light?

Try with a skydome.

And finally, check the Arnold log for errors.

If there's no errors, increase the verbosity to Warnings + Info, render again, and check the log.

Thanks

Stephen

Solid Angle Support

[ctedin3]

Maya used to handle spot and area lights correctly. Now they don't. Probably to match 3ds max's incorrect usage. Man made lights have a natural attenuation. They get dimmer the further from the source the object is. The photons spread out. You need to increase the exposure. That's the correct behavior. Suns and moons have parallel rays and don't attenuated. Try exposure of 8-10 and see how that works. Is this correct enough, Stephen? I hope I haven't misrepresented technically true light transport.

[ctedin3]

Of course, Arnold's lights are correct. I meant the standard spot lights with scanline and Mental Ray

[Anonymous]

Just turn up the light intensity to 100

[Anonymous]

Duh!... Thanks Stephen Blair.

[ianim8]

I am using the 30 day for testing demo on OSX.

Using the tutorial files from the Solid Angle website.

The studio_lighting_robot.ma is spitting out black frames sporadically.

I've tried everything I found on Google and no fix.

I would like to know what's causing this.

We would like to see if 2017 and Arnold can replace our 2014/Rman setup.

Why is this issue constant (judging from my Google search)?

Is there any fix at all?

I am using SP1 and will try and upgrade up to SP3.

However I had issues installing that on my Mac.

SP1 was the only working option.

[Anonymous]

So I was experiencing black frames with rendering as well... I tried everything I could find on the internet and really needed to render for my study... quite frustrating. What solved my issue was re-connecting the .ies lights I used in the background (and boom it worked). Hope this helps others as it took me 3 days intense trying to do it. Good luck 🙂

[Anonymous]

How do you reconnect .ies lights? I can't seem to locate it, don't know where to look.

[Anonymous]

You just re-connect the lights. A explanation of ies lights can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QImW-WyxSys

The issue could be a number of things but it was quite simply re-connecting the ies lights that worked for me , good luck.

[Anonymous]

Had to set Intensity = 1000

Exposure = 5