Render not working, ray traced shadows not appearing!!!

[eschab20]

Hi! 

I am trying to render a scene in Maya renderer but when I do, many problems occur. 

1) the shadows don't render, when I am trying to use ray trace shadows under my spotlight

2) the mesh isn't smoothed like it is in the camera view

3) an error occurs "# Error: RuntimeError: file /Applications/Autodesk/Arnold/mtoa/2020/scripts/mtoa/ui/globals/common.py line 2209: Object 'preMelSwGrp' not found."

Maya has also crashed when I try to render in Maya Software many times. However, the render DOES work when I switch to Arnold-render, but I need it to work for Maya Software too. 

Someone please help!!!

Screen Shot 2022-01-19 at 12.27.38 AM.png

[Kahylan]

Hi!

If you want to use the "Maya Software" Renderer, you can turn on the shadows by going into the rendersettings, expanding the "Raytrace Quality" Tab and checking the "Raytracing" box.

However, as far as I know the Maya Software Renderer has no awareness of the smooth mesh preview status of a mesh. So if you have smoothed meshes, you'll need to select the meshes and use the Modify>Convert>Smooth Mesh Preview to Polyons command to bake the subdivisions into the mesh.

You can also just use the "Maya Hardware 2.0" renderer, which will give you the shadows per default and will also display meshes that are smoothed with smooth mesh preview as long as the "SmoothMesh>Subdivisions Level>Use Preview Level for Rendering" Box is checked on the Shapenode of the mesh (it is checked on default in newer Maya versions).

I hope this helps!