Also you may want to solve the whole Mental Ray crashing thing (unless you're planning on using a third party renderer) because it's much more powerful than the default Maya Software renderer. Does Mental Ray crash even if you make a simple polygon cube in a fresh scene and render? Check the crash logs. If I make a new scene and add a cube, it works like a charm, but on other scenes it crashes. This is what it says in Maya: // Error: (Mayatomr.Output) : failed during mental ray rendering: mental ray abort // // Warning: (Mayatomr.Scene) : output data type "rgba_h" not directly supported by image format jpg, conversion performed by mental ray // // Error: *Fatal* (mental ray) : mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save the scene and exit Maya. // And this is what it says in the output window: IMG 0.3 10 MB warn 102002: type rgba_h not supported by iff format, using default type rgba PHEN 0.4 25 MB fatal 051109: runtime exception 0xc0000005: access violation PHEN 0.4 25 MB fatal 051109: runtime exception 0xc0000005: access violation If you know why that is, I would be extremely thankful! Edit: I forgot to say that I tried resetting my preferences, but its the same story