I can't get Mental Ray to render anything
 

Hi,
I've just installed Maya 6.5 complete. I wanted to have a quick play around with MR to check that everything was ok, but apparantly it's not.

If I try to render even the most basic of scenes, like three stacked cubes for example, in draft quiality mode, no shadows, no textures, nothing... The render View just sits there frozen. The only way out is the End the task and relaunch Maya.

Rendering with Maya software works as expected, for both new scenes and anything I created at Uni, but no MR.

Can anyone think why this might be the case?

I did accidently (long story) install the MR satellite on the host computer, but running the installer a second time seemed to uninstall it, since it's nowhere to be found on that computer anymore. I haven't installed MR satellite on any other computers yet, I'm just trying to do an MR render on the main computer. I hope the initial mistak eisn't what's causing the problem.

Any help you can possibly give would be great...
Thanks,
p

Crisis averted.

Zone alarm was doing its evil business, despite the fact that I had it disabled, and also removed from stasrtup in msconfig.

I thought that would be enough, but the "true vector" service was still running.

One all that crap was totally gone, smooth sailing.

Some one mentioned sygate's alternative was a bit more MR friendly...is this right?

I use Sygate and MR. have no problem at all with those 2. but in the end - how meaningfull is a firewall in actuality - exept causing problems? I´ve asked this question myself many times.

Well software firewalls don't do a great deal for you, but they do something...and with the amount of malicious crap on the net every little bit counts.

If you have the $ and the know-how, your best bet is a hardware firewall, but personally I have neither.

Thanks for the Sygate info,
p