Mental Ray has gone missing ?
 

I don't know what happened or how it happened, but the mental ray tab has gone missing from my render settings window. I have been looking all over for it, and a way to re-enable it, but i just don't have clue were to find it. I am using maya 8.

Any help would be appreciated.

Go to Window>Settings/Preferences>Plugin Manager and make sure that all of the things there are checked on for Loaded and Auto load.

oh wow, its right there...

its weird how the maya interface just disappears without you doing anything to make it go away...
like when the view cube just vanished... its not like i had played with that in the settings but there it was unticked... and my mental ray vanished as well... i'd bring it back by loading an old .mb file that had previously been used with mental ray and that worked, but this plug in manager is better...

wonder why things just go unticking itself...

That's Maya for you. ;)

so that's were it was hiding.
Thanks a bunch :)

thanks a lot

Had those 2 problems myself, and then I found the cube in the HUD, although I just find it a gimmick, I navigate by the mouse.
My MR usually disappears after an action has crashed Maya (for example if I exaggerate with mesh smoothing and then everything crashes due to too many polys).

I find the cube to be useful sometimes, but since it keeps disappearing I can live without it.

Yeah when you want a quick front, back, top etc view. But when you want fine movement around the object, cube can go, as it always sits there, being annoying and all...