I'm new to Maya and 3d modeling/animation in general. I've run into a problem that I haven't been able to solve, so I thought I'd look for some advice here.

First off, hello! Thanks for taking the time to read my post. Let me apologize up front in case I slaughter some of your terminology in the next few paragraphs. I'll do my best not to.

I'm using my friend's Learning Maya 5 book along with his Maya 8.5 software (it's been an interesting learning curve, for sure). I'm attempting to do the tutorial on making 2 spaceships dogfight.

I've built the ships and placed them into my animated scene. The trouble I'm having is trying to batch render the animation (120 frames is all) using the Maya Software renderer. The batch render encounters an error on the first frame and cancels.

I've narrowed it down to the NURBS spaceship. If I select each of it's 3 nodes in the hierarchy menu and hide them then the whole scene renders fine.

Some other info: both spaceships were built separately and simply referenced in the scene. The scene contains other NURBS but they were created within the scene itself (like the green laser beam that the NURBS ship shoots the polygon ship with).

The error simply states "An exception has occurred, rendering aborted." If I look at the .iff file of the first frame it appears to have only rendered a few small rectangular areas. The rest of the image is black. I would assume it got a few small sections done, ran into my goofy NURBS ship, and then failed.

If anyone can offer some advice on what I can check/modify to fix this I would be very grateful. Thanks in advance for any and all advice.