Why one or several Meshes of my Crowd Entities are not shaded correctly at render time ?

Submitted by nicolas.chaverou on Mon, 10/19/2015 - 10:20

As explained here, shading assignment is simply done by attaching a Shading Group / Shader name to a Mesh name in the Character File (.gcha). If a shader is not assigned correctly at render time it means that:

  • a Shading Group / Shader with the same name than the one in the Character File can not be found in the current rendering scene. To fix this you can import the maya scene of your LookDev character maya scene containing all the shaders in your rendering scene so that your renderer will be able to find them (using the Crowd Render Menu / Import Shaders).
  • if a Shading Group / Shader with the same name has been found but has not been assigned to a valid Maya Geometry (to make it active). To fix this, create a dummy geometry (e.g. a cube) and assign the missing Shading Group / Shader to it.
  • if a Shading Group / Shader with the same name has been found, is active but is incompatible with the current rendering engine (e.g. Shader node XXX is a V-Ray Material but you're rendering with Arnold).

Naming or non active shader problems can be easily prevented by using the Check Render Settings Tool (Crowd Render Menu / Check Render Settings):

In any of these situations, you should get verbose errors in either the Script Editor or the Output Window. Please check those first.