SUCESS!!!

To everyone that's helped me through this painful introduction to Maya lighting this week, I can't express my gratitude enough.

So, for all those who did and who are interested, here's what the problems were that were blowing out my scene, blowing out my window and freaking out (didn't even mention this part) Maya's render settings and UV mapping...

I did a full scene troubleshoot from my first incremental save of my first scene naming convention.

I wound up scrapping everything I did, deleted all the objects in the room, rebuilt the structure and started from square 1, fearing a cross contamination of the scene at that point.

It took me all night to go through everything. I eventually found the culprit and because I am a newb, I just plain both missed it when it happened and didn't understand the constant error scripts that were screaming at me to fix it (them).

The reasons were three fold...

1) there WAS a stray piece of geometry inside one of the legs of my table. This piece also happened to have a tessellation glitch in the poly.

The second glitch was that this was apparently causing the sun sky to ignore the last code or something to that effect of it's creation. It loaded without one of the program nodes. If that';s what you call the little node with the funky shape that looks like colored Lincoln logs.

So no matter what I did, I would never have been able to control it properly in terms of even working with the disc, or image drop in.

The third glitch, was that the combination of the first two glitches caused the outside and inside light energy to occlude the portal light to the blinding white it was stuck at. It also kept the high samples from having any effect in the area light's light pattern on the floor, which you guys remember how much I was pulling my hair out about.

The scene was just a mess. After I re-built the scene, I did an uninstall-reinstall of Maya. t seems to be working really well now. But I have to say, as I always find with her, the experience was invaluable. I learned more I think by having to go in and trouble shoot and got very comfortable with the lighting system.

So, below is the result done this morning on the clean stage. I've included both images here (The final lighting set up and texture is the bottom image) for comparison from what was happening.

This will be the only thread I will use for help in the future on this project. But I think it's pretty close to done for the simple set up it was intended as. That being a floating powdery plastered room far up in the stratosphere.

The lighting and texturing is finally done and turned out exactly how I wanted it. I just have to go in and bevel the window edges. I couldn't have done any of this to the extent I was able without everyone's help and comradery. Thank you again.

Here's "The Sky Room"...



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