Mental Ray SA 3.6.51 and Maya 7.0 campatible?

[stahr1]

I have a client that has a render farm set up by a prior contractor. They are using Muster as the render manager and are running Maya 7.0

They installed Rental Ray Standalone 3.6.51 on all of the render nodes, but it has never worked. Are these two products comaitible? 7.0 is too old to show up on the compatability grid on Autodesk's website.

Workstations OSX - Maya 7.0
Render Manager WinXP - Muster 5.4
Render Nodes OSX - Maya 7.0 and Mental Ray Standalone 3.6.51

Any input is appreciated. I don't understand this setup, or why they needed the stand alone licenses. I have everything working except Mental Ray distributed rendering.

[bart]

mr 3.6+ matches Maya 2008 SP1/Ext2, so Maya 7 is a considerable number of versions back. Remember that the maya shaders have to match, too, and with that amount of difference, I expect there would have been considerable change in them.

In theory, if you could compile the Maya 7 shaders for 3.6+, it might work, but then the translation export to mi files might depend on some of the changes as well. It is possible, that you might be able to use one Maya 2008 SP1/Ext2 license to convert from the old maya scene to a new one, and then export it to be compatible with mr 3.6+. I'm not sure how many versions back each Maya release supports regarding its scene files.

[stahr1]

Thanks for the reply. I am working with Autodesk to try to get this working. My client has a support subscription that I am hoping gives me access to the versions of software I need.

Thanks again...

[vimcipsug]

I would certainly move the files locally, sync the files and textures so if no changes are made, you don't have to send it again, especially textures. We have 600 nodes and virtually 1200 machines. Sending files that are 1GB in size can certainly slow us down. (there have been times when an artist has maxed the node assignment on a huge file and it has jammed up the works for 10 minutes or more) Our switch isn't a slouch either, it's an Extreme BlackDiamond bonded with optical fiber to its companions. At least with a few nodes now you can more easily work out problems.

[bart]

As an alternative to moving files local, I highly recommend a cach-ing file server be used. Most modern linux OSes provide this. This is based on testing in production company environments.