When trying to render a test frame from my scene I came across an error that seems to only happen when using maya software rendering.
Some of my objects had no shaders assigned to them, I'm not entirely sure what this means but apparently it has something to do with when I assigned a material to them. I tried again with maya hardware rendering and I didn't have this problem again.
The only problem now is that I can't seem to get any real shadows to cast properly, I have varying shades on the actual object but the intensity of light behind the object doesn't change at all.

There are white lines that appear on the roots that aren't actually there on the texture, I'm not sure as to what's causing this issue.