So I have this model that was exported from Imagemodeler and converted to FBX. It has diffuse textures. The geometry imports fine, the textures appear to come in fine, everything looks good in the viewport. I add a distant light, a camera, a mantra node and go to render and the render output is solid white this happens when rendering from view-mantra or the mantra node.

I'm on XP64 and I have the same problem in 9.5.171 and 9.5.241. Mantra just crashes if I render the scene in 10.0.210.

Any ideas on what might be going on here?

For H10 issues, you should post in the early access forum. In any case, could you post your .hip file here (or there) so we can test it out?

Andrew

Thanks for the response.

My point with the H10 was that I tried several versions of the software with this file (it originated in 9.5) with the same results. The textures on this file are sizeable, I'll have to post the hip file without textures, file is attached.

I see that you're a developer, the textures total 42MB compressed. If there is an ftp site or some server at sidefx I can upload the whole package for you to look at if necessary.

I still haven't resolved this issue, anyone else using fbx import with textures? Have you been successful?

I still haven't resolved this issue, anyone else using fbx import with textures? Have you been successful?

In general, yes, there should be no problems with materials coming from FBX.

In the hip file you've attached, the materials are indeed imported, but none of them seem to be actually assigned to any objects, which is very strange. Can you attach the original FBX file (preferably exported in ASCII)? That way I can take a look at what's going on during the import process itself, and see why materials are not being assigned to their respective objects.

Not assigned? Interesting because those textures display in the viewport just fine. I've attached the original fbx file and screenshots of the viewport and mantra render. I'm hoping that we can get this fixed soon. Thanks for looking into this.

Well, turns out I was wrong - I simply didn't look deep enough to notice that they are assigned on a per-polygon basis, and so the assignment happens in the each geo.

Can you also upload the textures, so I can verify they are indeed not being rendered? We do have an FTP server - please upload the compressed file into the incoming folder.

Server = ftp.sidefx.com
Username = anonymous or ftp
Password = your email address

Hopefully that's the last thing I will need to be uploaded.

Thanks again Oleg, I'll pack the whole directory (hip file, fbx, textures) up this afternoon and upload.

Oleg,

You've been PM'd with the file upload information.

As much as I don't like giving out answers like these, the problem appears to be with whatever exported the FBX file in the first place.

Basically, the rendered geometry is all white because all the materials have their shininess set to 0, and the alpha on all textures also set to 0. So to fix it, you need to change the shininess to something more reasonable for the Phong model, say, 20, or just switch to the Lambert model instead (I don't think the ground and the house are supposed to be shiny at all, though I guess in some cases they could be). Also, set the alpha for all textures to be 1.0. This seems to fix all the rendering problems.

I've checked our importer, and these values are coming directly from the file, so the exporter which created it must have put them in incorrectly. This is actually fairly common with FBX materials, because earlier versions of the FBX SDK, which everyone uses to read/write FBX files, were very poorly documented and there was a lot of confusion as to what many material properties mean and how they should be set.

Oleg,

This fbx file came out of an Autodesk product, I'll take it up with them. At least you came up with a fix even if it's manual.

You can consider the issue closed.

Thanks again for your help.

splitpoint
This fbx file came out of an Autodesk product, I'll take it up with them. At least you came up with a fix even if it's manual. You can consider the issue closed.

Thank you. It is probably fairly easy to write a simple Python script to do this automatically in Houdini for all the nodes, in case you don't feel like setting all the options manually.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, which product precisely did it come from? It may help us help others faster if they hit the same issue.

The original file came from Autodesk Imagemodeler. It was passed through the Autodesk fbx converter.