Maya 2015 Mental Ray batch render stopping unexpectedly (Maya 2015)

[hunter-reynolds]

Hello I am a student using Maya 2015 under the Educational 3-year liscense. I have been using it for several months with no issues, but I am having trouble with mental ray's batch renderer.

As stated in 1 other forum post, Here, when the render settings are completed and you go to "Batch render", the script editor shows progress on several frames, which are all completed. Then it suddenly stops, without any warning, and no matter how much time is spent, it will not render any more frames. There are no errors in the script editor.

I know that this is not an issue with my computer's stats, for I have the late 2013 IMac:

Processor  3.2 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory  8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Graphics  NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1024 MB

Software  OS X 10.9.4

This seems to occur any time that mental ray is used to batch render. from the simplest animations to my current 3d tracking, shading, lighting text project

I have added attachments of the script editor window and the render settings:

Please please please help me! I dont know what's going wrong, and I can't render any of my videos and animations until I find a solution!!

Thanks in advance,

Hunter

[Karen.Snow]

Hello,

There is a known issue where Maya batch rendering with Mental Ray will hang on MAC OS 10.9. This does not happen on OS 10.8, or other platforms and seems to be specific to Mavericks. Basically the Mental Ray batch render will hang, generally at random.

The development teams are currently investigating a fix for this issue which will be addressed in a future update/release. We are unable to issue an ETA but it will be as soon as possible.

Please keep an eye on the Maya Knowledge base for updates. When this is addressed it will be listed in the release notes of the update.

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya

Best Regards,

Karen

[hunter-reynolds]

Dear Karen,

Thank you very much for the response. That really is a bummer. I have lots of models and animations that I was really looking forward to rendering. Are there any other ways to render videos or animations with mental ray??

Also, I know that you said the E.T.A is unknown, but could you at least infer at all how long it might be? How long do issues like this usually take to be solved? Weeks? Months? Even Years?

Thanks again,

~Hunter

[ReidarAndreasRichardsen6417]

Having the same problem. Seems to happen both from within Maya and when rendering from the command line.

Have also experienced that test renderings just halts with a few buckets remaining, forcing me to force-quit Maya. "Escaping out" doesn't work.

Last night, Maya completed 69 frames at 2 minutes/frame, after that it continued rendering, but using 10-11 min/frame. When i checked the computer this morning, Maya used 100% CPU, instead of the normal 800% on a MBP Retina i7. It seems most, but not all threads died.

I have a lot of rendering to do this weekend, and I'm feeling a bit frustrated over this. There are deadlines to be met.

I'm on a MBP Retina late 2012, with 16 GB ram, Maya 2015 sp2 and Mac OS X 10.9.4

Regards,

Reidar

[adrian]

Having the same issue here. Have tried all sorts of workarounds to no avail.

Currently very dissapointed and frustrated with Maya's lack of reliability.

Maya's had problems with rendering for years, but I've had nothing but problems since upgrading to Mavericks and installing Maya 2015 SP3. I've lost several nights of sleep and weeks behind on work because of this and all the other crashes and hangs.

Currently downloading Service Pack 4, which says in the ReadMe file that it fixes the Mental Ray hanging issue.

(http://download.autodesk.com/us/support/files/maya_2015_service_pack_4/Maya2015_SP4_Readme_enu.htm)

Thanks Karen for pointing out that link, which is where I found the service pack. I didn't receive any other announcements about it. Fingers crossed it works.

Software reliability is as important as features... if not more so.

I've been using Maya since v1.0. It's fallen way behind in both rendering and overall reliability.

A

[stooch]

problem not fixed 2015 sp4 on windows 7 64bit.

[charlekm]

Hi Karen,

Will I be able to download the Service Pack 5 if I currently have the student version of Maya 2015?

also, will the Service pack 5 solve the problem of my mental ray btach render stopping unexpectedly in mac ios yosemite?

thanks!

Charles

[dbetan02]

Yes, you can download Mental Ray SP5 for the student version.  Maya 2015 is very buggy.  So, no telling if it will work...just give it a try.

[soulbender88]

Hello Karen,

Does the develpment team know that SP4, SP5 and ext 1 + SP5 still did not fix the problem? In fact they made it worse because now Mental Ray will not batch render at all! I'm running 10.9.5 and I'm able to batch render in Maya 2014 but not in Maya 2015.

I hope you respond to this because I'm not spending $900 to talk to tech support so please can we have some free info?

[stooch]

My issue was cause by a paint effects brush that had a warning that it may not evaluate correctly. So if you have any warnings in the render log about things not evaluating correctly, I suggest you fix them.

[adam.2011]

Hi Karen,

Can you confirm whether this has been patched yet? If I download SP5, should batch render with mental ray work (I'm running OSX Yosemite)?

Adam

[dbetan02]

It is working for me.  I downloaded all patches from 1 to 5 and loaded each one after the other.  I don't know if only loading SP5 will do the trick.  Someone else will have to answer that.  If it is not working for you, you might want to try my way and load all service packs in order.  A long process, but that's my way.

If you're new to Maya, make sure that you have changed the default render 1-10 to the full range of frames you want to render. Some people think that Mental Ray is stopping when, in fact, they have not set the correct frame range.  

Also, make sure you have an active internet connection.  If you don't then Mental Ray won't run properly.  It has to check the license.

Only one version of Maya should be running at the time of your render (not including the Output Window which should stay open at all times - so if you're closing that ... don't).  If you have Maya open on another machine or two windows open on your desktop, I believe that Mental Ray will detect that and not allow the render.

Hope it helps.

[adam.2011]

Thanks for this - I will try again with SP5. The OSX service pack requires a complete reinstall anyway, rather than just a patch.

I can confirm that I had the correct render range set correctly last time - the batch render would render a few hundred frames, then hang when part way through a render. Was just annoying because I couldn't rely on a render being finished overnight.

[sniper_911_prime]

I may have found a fix for some with the rendering cutting out unexpectedly after 15 sec or so.

Try setting a time step size of 1.100 or higher and both the start and end times to be divisible by the input time step.

This seemed to fix it for me.  The reason why this probably worked was due to zero error in the code for PC users for the increment between frames in the batch rendering.  So as an example rendering starts at time A and goes to time B for frame 1 then frame 2 would go from time C to time D but some logic function says that time B can not be less than or equal to time C causing a crash because in order to record from time B to D the rendering would need to likely start at some time before time B to give start time to the recording process.