Troubleshoot lighting and shading

The following table lists common problems related to lighting and shading and possible solutions:

Problem/Error Message Possible Solution

The materials and textures appear much brighter than expected on the model in the 3D View.

The number of lights and their intensity has an effect on how objects appear in the scene.

Determine how many lights are currently active in the scene by viewing the items in the Object List.

If there are multiple lights, try reducing their intensity of turn some off and see if this reduces the overall brightness of the material or texture.

The following message appears when turning on the Cavity Ambient Occlusion viewport filter: Cavity Ambient Occlusion process took <n> seconds. Filtering of 32 bit floating point textures may not be supported by your hardware. Disabling texture filtering in the preferences may improve performance.

This message indicates that your computer’s graphics card may not be able to display the cavity ambient occlusion viewport filter at its highest quality.

Save your work, turn off the Use Texture Filtering option in Render section of the Preferences window, then restart Mudbox and load your file again to see if the Cavity Ambient Occlusion filter effect is improved.

Compare your hardware’s specifications to the hardware listed at http://www.autodesk.com/mudbox-hardware.

Shadows do not appear on models in the 3D View.

Check what light types are in the scene. Directional light types are the only shadow casting lights in Mudbox.

Ensure that both Cast Shadows and Receive Shadows properties for the light and the material are turned on. For more information, see Directional light properties and Material properties.

The frame rate at which Mudbox refreshes is slow.

Shadow casting lights can have a negative impact on performance depending on the number of lights and the complexity of the scene.

Turn off shadows whenever they are not required.