Maya 8 comes with Mental Ray 3.5 but I have a small renderfarm that I used with Maya 7 and it has Mental Ray 3.4 stand alone. There must be a way to run Mental Ray 3.5 for Maya8 when doing distributed rendering to a farm with Mental Ray 3.4 stand alone on it but I can't find any info. The people at Autodesk won't answer my Emails. Has anyone else had this problem and were able to solve it?

Maya 8 is virtually incompatable with anything used in Maya 7 at the moment. Alias has to make more stuff so that you can use your old renderfarm. So, most things aren't exportable with Maya8 either. In my opinion, Maya 8 is unnecessary and is barely any different than Maya 7. So, I guess you'll have to wait for a plug-in or something.

You'll also notice that art done in Maya 8 can't be taken to Maya 7.

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman

echo red:

you can use maya 8 scenes to early maya versions as maya 3. maya is backward compatible.

as for dist rendering, MR 3 5 can use up to 8 satelites render nodes in maya 8.

but if you want to use your renderfarm using MR 3 4, u can export your scenes as .mi and render with MR standalone.

im not sure if .mi files has issues with specific MR version [i doubt it does] so scenes exported as .mi in maya 8 should [probably] will work fine in MR 3 4 even though maya 8 ships with MR 3 5 core

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Thanks guys. In the meantime, I used this little problem as an excuse to buy a new computer. I'm waiting for my double dual core w/4 gig of ram and a raid 0 array to arrive from Alienware. I may still go with your suggestion, Vlad, but I've been itching to buy a new machine. :attn:

How come my Maya 8 stuff cant be loaderd in Maya 7?

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman

because you're trying to open up .mb files... if you save your scene as .ma, you can open the file using notepad and change all references of 'maya 8.0' to 'maya X.XX' (x.xx being the version you want to have open the file) and that version should be able to open it, depending on what 'newer' features you've used...

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Accept no substitutions.

Ah, never would've thought of that.

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

George Bernard Shaw - Man and Superman