Problems with Maya. Or just me.

[Meg]

I am a total newbie to Maya. I have the animation down pretty well, but this modeling aspect is a pain in the ass for me.

The character I'm modeling is in Polygons (converted from NURBs), and I've begun to merge the vertices together. In some areas, such as the feet and tail as seen in the picture, it will get black and stay that way once rendered. And no matter where I move that newly made point in space, it will still be black.

Any help would be greatly appreciated since my professor has no clue what he's doing.

EDIT: Also, when I view those areas from different angles, they look smooth and out of place (same with the seam running down the legs, so maybe it's a setting I have?)

[CammieDee666]

Sorry I cant help i use 3ds

Mod edit: Then why the hell are you posting?

[meowoot]

It could be illegal polygons. Polygons aren't supposed to have more than 4 sides and they're not allowed to be folded. The second part is kind of difficult to explain but I'll try:
You can't fold a polygon like a piece of paper. Maya won't know what to do with it and it results in weird shading errors. A polygon has to be totally flat.

So I'd split polygons up that are more than four sided and make sure that your polys don't have any weird folds or anything in them. If they do then split them.

Another problem could be the normals. Normals are basically how maya shades something by default and it can look super weird if they aren't correct.
Select the edges that look weird and go up to the Normals menu, then click "soften edge". It could be that you want it smooth and maya is trying to shade it like it's a hard blocky object.
Since your whole object is supposed to be smooth you could probably just select every edge then use soften edge.

If that doesn't work then try converting all the edges to hard edges, then back to soft. Sometimes Maya is just wonky.

[Meg]

Thank you SO MUCH. I did a cleanup first, then did Average Normals (for some reason it didn't fix anything without having cleaned up first). It's lumpy-looking now but at least the dark spots are gone.

[Robert.B]

the reason why your getting those hard edges is because you have floating edges and unmerged vertices. press Ctrl+F9 and that will select all verts then from the merge verts option box reset the settings to default then just apply and it will merge all floating verts and floating edges.