IRay render solid black

U_Iuiko

Can anyone tell me what might be happening when an IRay render comes out solid black?  It only happens in some cases, but I haven't seen a common factor.  3Delight renders always work.

fixmypcmike

Something blocking the lights, like a skydome?

SpottedKitty

Are you using native Iray lights, converting them yourself, or relying on the autoconversion from 3Delight? If everything goes wrong in the same way, it's possible to have the lighting come out very dim, but the default Tone Mapping setting (in the Render Settings>Environment tab) is for a bright sunny day outdoors — if none of your light emitters are actually in the camera view, it's quite possible for the scene to be completely black, or nearly so.

Remember that Iray lighting is so different from 3Delight you will need to learn it all over again almost from the beginning. Iray does a much better job of simulating actual real-world lighting without all of the faked-out shortcuts 3Delight uses. If you have experience of using a real manual camera, that will help quite a bit in understanding the Iray lighting controls.

U_Iuiko

Thanks for the responses.  I'm afraid, though, that this is a bit beyond me.  There are different "Iray lights" that need to be converted?  Is there some resource you can recommend where I could read up on this a bit?

Tobor

A common cause is the camera is below ground level. Depending on the Iray ground settings, this can cause an opaque render.

If in doubt about any lighting setup, just add the default "Ruins" HDR image in the Environment pane. This happens automatically when you reset the Iray render defaults. Once reset, render again, and if the scene is still black, then it's likely not the lighting. It's something else, such as the ground, or one of the other things mentioned above.