Hi MrCat

You are on the right track but instead of grouping the moon to the earth, first group the moon to itself. Set the pivot point of this "moon group" to be in the centre of the earth. This...

You have a couple of options. You can go with the use background shader or you can use the mental ray production shaders.

Jay has a tutorial on the usebackground shader https://vimeo.com/18536683...

Hi xgabrielx, which render engine are you using? Shadow passes/catchers are implemented slightly different by the different render engines.

Have you tried unlocking the normals?

Are you referring to the Arnold watermark added to the render output?

Have a look and make sure the AbcImport and AbcExport plugins are loaded.

Hi, the Maya software renderer can't render the primitives generated by xGen. Switch to mental ray.

Hi, have a look at the surface normals of the handle. They are most probably reversed. Select the blade and go to Normals->Reverse (Under polygons menu set).
Another quick way to see if normal are...

You have a small typo in the script. Set $onlyFirstObject to $objectsArray[0].

Hi Sean

I downloaded the files. I opened the scene file (desktop.0002.ma) and apart from frame 0 pointing to a non-existant image, i could not find anything weird about the file.

Your last...