Hello Mac users, you love to stay on your Mac and use mental ray for Maya? No problem, since Maya offers the same Qt user interface and experience like on Windows or Linux.

Maya scene files and mental ray.mi files that have been generated on other platforms can simply be used on the Mac. Even the configuration files, “Maya.env” and “maya.rayrc”, work identically. All true, but Several things are different. Most recent java version for mac. For example, the unique use of Mac specific keyboard shortcuts is puzzling, like in the “open scene” window. Switching to the “OS native” file dialog is possible in the Maya preferences. Although it might even be more confusing to use Qt and non-Qt side by side. What about mental ray?

Well, it is only dependent on the underlying Unix basis “Darwin” with its stable and standardized interfaces. That keeps it quite independent from frequent Mac OS X updates, which typically just touch the application levels of the operating system. But the most recent “Mavericks” update of OS X, version 10.9, seem to have changed some multi-threading behavior of the kernel. Mental ray is obviously also affected, and shows unexpected interruptions, or even gets blocked completely during rendering. Quicken.

Our developers are currently diving into it, to come up with a solution as soon as possible. Here is another little annoyance: The message log for mental ray preview rendering has disappeared a few Mac OS X versions back, also due to a system change that handles console output. The batch rendering is not affected since it writes the messages to a file.

For OSX, unlike previous upgrades, for 2016 Ext2 you do NOT need to delete your 2016 installation. If you want to get mental ray back now, go ahead and download the generaic Maya 2016 SP6 download and install and then install the latest MR plugin. That should all work and you will have mental ray back. Mental ray for Maya 2015 March 26, 2014 May 7, 2014 mentalray2014 bifrost, maya, mental ray, nvidia, vfx rendering In this post, we give a short intro to the newest features of the mental ray for Maya 2015 plugin that is delivered with Autodesk Maya 2015.

There is a workaround for preview rendering, though, using mental ray for Maya’s built-in log facility that works separately to the system log. It can be enabled on the Maya command line like this (also useful for a Shelf button): Mayatomr -preview -log It will create a file with the fixed name “mentalray.log”, typically residing in the last opened scene file directory. Double-clicking on the file in the Mac Finder will open the Console App, giving a similar experience to the message display on other platforms. If you enable the Console preference “bring log window to front” it will pop up automatically with each mental ray rendering of that scene using the -log command. Mental ray for Maya log messages Happy rendering!