That doesn't seem right. Take a look at this: Troubleshooting mental ray Rendering on Maya - YouTube If you have the time, watch the full thing. If you just want to see what I'm specifically pointing to, go to 22 minutes and 58 seconds. Follow those diagnostics, and see if it still crashes. Thank you but I've already figured what happened: I exceeded the poly numbers (spheres were double-smoothed and my scene was HUGE). The fix was to just reduce polys on some of the spheres. My scene contains a whole solar system (minus a few dwarf planets and + a few other stars in the distance, the grid is so small now...). Now I'm trying to animate it but found out that MR doesn't have the convenient .avi option -_- Now I either have to import 1 image at a time to make a movie in Corel Photo-paint (because bulk import reverses the image order, don't know why) or find some other program that acts like Corel and does bulk import in the correct order + has frame control and export to .avi.