Black mesh - not sure what the problem is

I’m new to doing 3D stuff in Unity. I’m having some problems I just can’t find the reason behind.

I’m trying to set up a sample scene using baked lighting.
I have a couple meshes I created in Maya and Unity seemed to have no problems importing. I have a couple materials I made using textures I got online. I got two lights, and a few cubes and capsules that were just made from the menu in Unity.
I have “contribute global illumination” checked on all my objects, and in my lighting settings I selected “baked global illumination” under mixed lighting and selected the progressive CPU under the lightmapper.

Some problems I’m having:

My custom meshes appear as a solid black.
If I switch the draw mode to “baked lightmap” they appear as a solid gray while my generic shapes properly show their lighmap values on a white-and-gray checkerboard.
I set up the UV’s properly within Maya, and I exported the mesh as a Maya Ascii file.

My custom materials don’t show any signs of normal maps, height maps, or specular highlights.
If I toggle off the light-bulb icon to switch to “a light attached tot he scene view camera” I can see all these effects perfectly fine.

I don’t know what settings to check here…

It’s probably just too dark to see. Do you have lights in your scene? Did you try baking the lighting already, or is it on auto? In Baked lighting, when you add a light it doesn’t actually light anything until you bake the lighting again. You can do this in the lighting settings, or if it’s set to auto, Unity will automatically re-bake the scene at some point.

When you import an fbx, the material will only have the albedo map assigned (at best). You pretty-much have to set these up on your own. I don’t even bother setting-up materials in my modelling app. If you’ve already set these up, it’s probably the lighting once again.

I wonder if some of the faces on your model got corrupt, and the normals on some of those faces are facing all over the place?

Can you post a pic or screenshot?

I guess I wan’t clear.
I also have some basic shapes in my scene, the ones you create within Unity from the menu. Those are lit just fine. It is only the meshes I imported from Maya that are having problems.

The materials didn’t come from Maya; I just made a a material asset within Unity, changed it to “standard specular setup” and plugged in textures I downloaded online. When applied to my generic cubes, they appeared properly until I switched to the baked lighting, and now I don’t see any specular highlights; fairly sure the normal and height maps aren’t showing either.

I didn’t export it as an fbx originally, (I exported it as Maya ascii,) but I just tried exporting as fbx and that mesh has the same problem.

I also just noticed that when I move some of the unity-generated cubes and tell it to generate the lighting, it takes a minute for the lighting to generate, but when I add or move the imported meshes the lighting generates very quickly, like it decided nothing changed.
I can see no difference in the Mesh Renderer component between the cube and my mesh, except that under “lightmapping” the cube has a “baked lightmap” attached to it while my custom mesh does not, and under “probes” the light probes are grayed out and set to off, while on my mesh I could change the light probes to something else. But all the settings are the same.

Pictures:


Did you mark the imported meshes as lightmap static?

I do not see a setting called that. Where do I find it?

I did mark the “contributes global illumination” box, if that’s what you mean. (I understand it used to be called something else.)

Sorry, the way I worded that makes it sound like an import setting. I was actually just talking about objects in the scene. These can be marked as “static” but if click on the drop-down you can set “lightmap static” individually.

If you simply set the object to “static” then it should automatically set all the individual static flags, though, so if it’s probably already set.

I was talking about the setting in the “Mesh renderer,” But I see what you were talking about now; there is a check box at the very top of the inspector next to the name that says “Static”
It was already set to “Contribute GI” just like the cube that is working. I tried setting everything to static but it still didn’t change anything. There is no “lightmap static” option in the drop-down; I think maybe that was the thing renamed to “Contribute GI”