Render Issues.....

I was hoping to start rendering my finished environment yesterday, but came across that Mental Ray wasn't casting any shadows in my scene. I had done test renders before, but usually in Maya Software, and I also rendered some in Mental Ray and had no problems. Sometimes I would get an out of memory error message, but I knew that's because I don't have a lot of RAM, but planned to render on another machine. Then last night I realised Mental Ray wasn't casting shadows, so I tried to fix the problem but all I got was a "Fatal Error" message.

So I searched online to try and work out the problem, and they were all saying it was a RAM issue, but when I asked Jenn, kyle and Matt to look at it, they didn't think it was as it also wasn't working on the university computers either. Jenn and I tried to export the scene and import into a new scene as well as taking one object out and trying to render, and it still would not work. So we decided we weren't sure what it was...and I could try to look though the textures to see if it was them though this could take a while.

So I changed my textures from targas to .maps with a programme of the Internet. As well as, after talking to Paul about it, and running a render diagnostics and finding over 200 errors that it was the textures which were definitely the problem.

It took me a day to fix all the errors, but I got rid of them and thought it would work...but I still got the same error message. On the cusp of giving up and just rendering in Maya Software so I had something to hand in I gave it one last attempt as I refused to be defeated as I really wanted to render in Mental Ray. I went through some of my old files to see which would render until I got to the most up to date version (which was exactly the same as the one getting the error messages). I made it up to the new version with everything ready to render......I set up the render in mental ray...and waited. To my surprise it worked!!! I don't know why, and I'm certainly not complaining, but it was rendering. So I will hopefully have a Mental Ray rendered film to hand in....if all goes well. To spread the load of the rendering I also planned to render on the university computers....but again I got the error message. So it was me and my laptops against the world!! But I have to thank Jenn and Kyle for all their support over this issue..they helped me get through. Whether face to face or over MSN.