mental ray for Maya 2015 SP4 is now available for download. It ships with mental ray version 3.12.1.18.
These are the most important fixes:
- We are glad to announce that we were able to remove the cause for freezes and crashes on Mac OS X version 10.9, “Mavericks”. To our Mac OS X users, test it out and let us know your experiences.
- Some problems around motion blur of XGen geometry were fixed. Please, note that we still recommend setting the Motion Steps parameter to 1 when using XGen hair with motion blur (see mental ray Motion Blur Settings in the XGen Preview/Output window) . This issue will be fixed in the future.
- Artifacts with texture caching of Tiff textures as well as a problem with imf_copy and multiple level support were fixed.
Check out the Maya 2015 SP4 release notes inside the download for the complete list of fixes and the complete mental ray documentation
Thanks for your feedback.
Inside mental ray 
Too bad Mental Ray and iray blogs are rarely updated! I check ’em every day 🙂
This blog is written by a group of mental ray developers. There is a long list of topics that we want to cover over time. Please, stay patient since we have to balance our efforts between dev time and blog time 😉
Some customers are also reporting issues with using Motion Blur By other than 1.0 in this separate xgen menu for motion blur settings in XGen Preview/Output. Note also that there is a separate UI for each XGen collection. So if you tend to build a scene with XGen in multiple separate pieces, there will be a setting required for each. Typically, this should all match, if you want the blur to match.
We don’t think one would need a separate setting for each, but if you see a need for it, please let us know as we suggest directions to go with the rendering part of the UI with Autodesk.
[…] 3: Just found this post on Inside Mental Ray, there is an SP4, and they claim to have fixed it. So we’ll […]
Is there any more detail on what caused the issue with the OSX hangs? I can’t upgrade to 2015 at the moment, but would love to know if there’s anything I can do in the meantime. I am trying to use Dave Girard’s workaround for the time being, but with it, I can’t string together multiple renders from multiple files without initiating them manually. With Terminal, this was an easy task using a “;”. Dave’s workaround uses the main application instead of the “render” command: http://polygonspixelsandpaint.tumblr.com/post/72917357683
FWIW, I’m using Maya 2014, fully patched.