White logo comes out black...

[kopperdrake]

It's an odd thing, not sure if it's a bug.

I've just installed LW 8.3 and am doing a birdseye view of an architectural development which includes a carparking area. 3 of the car parking spaces have a disabled parking emblem in white. I have created this as an actual flat object placed about 5mm above the car park surface.

My problem is that if I render the scene with FPrime the emblem shows white, as it should, but when rendering with LW's native renderer then it has come out solid black. There is nothing unusual about the surfacing, I have a tarmac texture (24bit targa) applied to the colour channel and a procedural applied as an alpha to this colour texture to allow the white of the logo to show through the tarmac's basic colour. I also have the same applied to the bump channel.

Anyone else have the same problem? I'll look a bit more incase I'm doing something stupid but it's odd that FPrime renders it ok.

Dunk

[kopperdrake]

Ah - in FPrime I'm rendering the scene with MonteCarlo 3 bounce radisosity but with Lightwave I'm using background radiosity - would this make a difference? Nothing else in the scene is changing radically colour-wise.

I've attached some pics to show the difference.

I've also carried out tests with LW's renderer using MonteCarlo and still they're black. I've dropped all textures from the surface but still black. There are no shaders applied which would explain the difference in FPrime and Lightwave render.

I've made sure that the object is affected by the light (both the area and radiosity).

[kopperdrake]

Ok - my silly fault! The black is the shadow and I can't see the emblem as I've appled a -1 value in the scale box in the X axis to flip the object around. This had the effect of flipping the polygons from +Y to -Y facing, which for some reason FPrime doesn't pick up on!

If you do the same thing in Modeler, apply a -100% scale in the X then it also flips the polygons so at least Layout and Modeler are consistent

Soz