My tree is rendering black

[bntheman]

I have been toying with the paint effects brush, while trying to learn to create a tree. According to my preview, I think everything is set to my likings, so I decided to do a render. However, I get nothing when I go to render the tree. I did a search here, and I did find one thread close to my situation.

Well anywho, some of the tips that I was reading through were making sure I do the following...

1. Do not render in Mental Ray: check

2. Are you rendering an IFF image?: check

3. Have you tried converting the paint effects into polygons and then tried rendering it?: yes, and that works. However, I hate to keep on swapping back in forth from paint effects to polygons, render it, and then back to paint effects so I can make some more tweekings.

4. Are you rendering in Big Scale?: not sure, and I do not know how to fix this

5. Make sure that Paint Effect rendering is turned on in the Render Globals.: Check

6. Have I tried rendering from the command line?: no, and I do not know how.

7. Are you low in memory? In my opinion I do not think so. The task manager reads I have 1.5MBs left out of 512MB, and Maya is using 256MB

8. If all else fails, then try rendering in 2 passes.: ??? How do you do that?

Since I tried most of these things in the above check list, could their be something else that I have missed?

[thnkr]

1. is a problem. You have 1.5 megabytes left? On system that has 512 megabytes? Aw...

But I doubt that that's causing your problem. Here are some other ideas.

a) find out if the pfx shows up in the alpha channel. If it does, you have a shading problem. If not, check that Enable stroke rendering is on in the Render Settings under Paint Effects Rendering Options.

b) if it's a shading problem, check that the pfx is illuminated; if there are no lights in the scene, make sure Enable Default Light is on in the Common Tab of the Render Settings.

c) see if another default brush renders correctly. If it does, check your brush. Make sure Modify Color is on (under Channels)