Caustics and GI not working in 2009?

[liqueo]

I haven't been able to get caustics or GI to work in maya 2009 (intel mac version and windows x64 version) with mental ray and I'm wondering if I'm missing some setting because of the way the globals have been split up. In the help docs it said to make sure objects are marked for photon tracing and I don't remember there being a setting like that in previous version of maya.

I use mia_material (regular, x, or x_passes) in most of my scenes and no matter how high I crank the caustic photon settings in my area lights, spot lights and/or IBL there are no caustics generated. I even lowered the caustic quality to 5, thinking maybe that the caustics were getting blurred. I also shut off FG to make sure that wasn't blurring. Still no luck.

in a current scene it's pretty simple. An mia_material on an ice cube that has displacement map generated in mudbox. There is a ground plane with mia_material to pick up some reflections. For the ice cube shader I have refractive caustics turned on. reflect and refract are cranked up in the globals and caustics turned on but no mater what I try I see no changes in the scene.

I cannot post this scene as it's for a client, however I can put in some proxy geo and post an image in an hour or so. Any info will be appreciated.


---edit---

I should also add that when I do a diagnostic render, the entire render is blue, Mac OS X console tells me that no photons were stored after 10000. Only when I use GI do I see some of those dots show up in a diagnostic render, but there are very few, even if I use 1,000,000 GI photons.

[FeD]

hi,

I have a similar probleme with GI, and I ended with the conclusion that the probleme was the "mia_material_x_passes" material that simply dont work with GI...

I test same scene simple pointlight emitting photons & no direct light : lambert work, mia_material_x work.. but mia_x_passes.. render black !

if someone can help..

[onedigitalartist]

funny i was just going to post the that i could not get caustics to work with mia_material_x_passes.... and they only way i could get the raytraced shadows to work was to change the shadow type from simple to segmented... but to sum is up i think caustics is broken for mia_material_x_passes

[liqueo]

Yes, what I have found is that mia_material_x and X_passes BOTH do not seem to work. Regular mia_material works, although I am disappointed that many of the new render passes do not work with mia_material. I even had some oddness where I could split the mia_material into reflect/spec/diffuse passes but in other scenes it wouldn't work and all passes would look the same or blank.

Maybe they want people to use X/Xpasses when they are customizing things.

[liqueo]

One other note, I did notice that I had to crank up the photons and intensity for most scenes WAAAAAY past what I used to have to use when using maya materials and older MR/maya versions. Maybe it was just the nature of my scenes though.