Hi everyone,

My name is Josh. I have been using Maya since it was first released way back in the late 1990's. I am currently running Maya 2014.

My problem is that I am trying to animate a ship on some water using MR physical sun and sky + final gather and mental ray. I'm having an issue whenever I batch render my file i'm getting a horrible black shadow (not even sure if it is an actual shadow) cast over the ship in the scene. When I render in the render view the shadow isn't there and my single frame renders look good enough. The shadow doesn't seem to be cast by anything in the scene because it doesn't follow the settings of the shadows that should be there. As far as I can tell there is no hidden geometry anywhere that could be the potential cause of this rendering issue. No image planes or anything else but my sunlight, my ship, and my water planes are visible in the scene. Part of me suspects this is an issue with the physical sky and sun or my final gather settings, but I have tweaked all of them with no success.

I have enclosed two rendered frames to look at with this post. If anyone out there has seen this problem before and more importantly knows how to solve it, please let me know.

Thank you,

Josh