Dark brown material showing as bright orange in raytraced

Rendering
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1

Hi, I’m having a really strange rendering issue in Rhino that I can’t resolve and hoping someone can help.

The problem:
Objects that have a dark brown/almost black material assigned are rendering as bright orange in Raytraced (Cycles) mode. The color shown in the material editor is correct (dark brown) but the rendered output is completely wrong. I have previously rendered this exact model an it has turned out as I intended it to be but for some reason the material has started showing as bright orange no matter what I do. The only thing I’ve changed is some of the design and the lighting but I have tried turning off/reducing all the lighting and no change.

What makes this strange:

  • The material panel clearly shows a dark brown/black base color assigned
  • The object renders bright orange regardless
  • This is not an overexposure issue — even in a very dark scene the objects still read as orange, meaning the color itself is wrong, not the brightness
  • This happened after I added some additional lighting to the scene, but turning all lights off including skylight does not fix it
  • The floor is the only orange object in the scene and I have hidden it — the wood still renders orange

Everything I have already tried:

  • Adjusting and disabling all lights including skylight and sun
  • Creating brand new Physically Based materials from scratch
  • Removing all textures from the material so it is a plain color only
  • Running _Purge
  • Running TestRemoveAllCyclesData
  • SaveAs to a new file
  • Creating a completely new file and importing geometry
  • Checking for emission (there is none)
  • Changing material type between Custom and Physically Based

Nothing has changed the rendered color at all. The material editor shows the correct dark brown color but Raytraced ignores it completely and shows orange.

I have attached images showing that in rendered mode it is showing as the colour/texture i want it as and in raytraced it suddenly turns bright orange

Screenshot 2026-03-09 at 11.49.01
Screenshot 2026-03-09 at 11.49.011919×1079 280 KB

Screenshot 2026-03-09 at 11.48.43
Screenshot 2026-03-09 at 11.48.431919×1077 289 KB

Any help would be massively appreciated, I’ve been stuck on this for hours.

2

We would need to see the file, writing a book telling us what you’ve done doesn’t help at all.

I mean, to me so far it does in fact look like a lighting/exposure issue, brown is tricky as “brown doesn’t exist, it’s orange in context.” Also unless your materials are somehow not what you have set, which is very unlikely, there’s nothing else it could be.

4

here’s the file link, I’d appreciate any pointers as I’m new to this

5

Okay I think the primary problem is that your lights have no falloff, they just spew light at a constant brightness forever, so there’s just way too much light–or I should say it’s just way too flat and even. I guess that’s the default, which is a now-comical relic of last century rendering.

Otherwise having a woodgrain texture would help a lot to make it read as a brown thing.