Hi all,
after decades of supporting the rendering community worldwide, the NVIDIA ARC Forum will go out of service, unfortunately, including all of its mental ray sections. That does not mean its vast valuable content is lost, but we will stop hosting it on the original website location.
For those of you who are searching for the download links of the free Mental Ray software, which we did publish in the forum as well, here you are. We include a copy of the text of the original announcement followed by all the links to the pieces of software.
Happy rendering!
The version 1.2 update of the NVIDIA Mental Ray for Maya and NVIDIA Mental Ray for 3ds Max plugins, and the corresponding Mental Ray Standalone distributions are based on the latest major mental ray version 3.14.5.
This software update introduces support for NVIDIA’s Volta GPU generation, and is based on CUDA 9. It will continue to work with the older GPU generations Pascal, Maxwell, and Kepler. The update also fixes a lot of known issues, and improves rendering performance especially for GI Next. Note, the plugin works in Maya 2018.5 dot release too.
Please note, the plugins are free to use for interactive rendering and rendering of still frames from within Maya or 3ds Max. The rendering of animations with Maya Batch, Backburner or Mental Ray Standalone will ask for a license though.
UPDATE
Some of the the download links have changed after re-locating the packages on the download site. The Maya 2016 versions have been removed since they were outdated and the Maya 2016 version still offers the built-in mental ray plug-in. If you still require those versions please come back to us.
NVIDIA Mental Ray for Maya Plugin
Windows
- Maya 2018
mentalray-for-Maya-2018-1.2.1-nt-x86-64-vc14-mr3.14.5.3.exe - Maya 2017
mentalray-for-Maya-2017-1.2-nt-x86-64-vc11-mr3.14.5.1.exe
Linux
- Maya 2018
mentalray-for-Maya-2018-1.2.1-linux-x86-64-gcc4-mr3.14.5.3.run - Maya 2017
mentalray-for-Maya-2017-1.2-linux-x86-64-gcc4-mr3.14.5.1.run
macOS
- Maya 2018
mentalray-for-Maya-2018-1.2.1-macosx-x86-64-clang-mr3.14.5.3.pkg - Maya 2017
mentalray-for-Maya-2017-1.2-macosx-x86-64-clang-mr3.14.5.1.pkg
NVIDIA Mental Ray for Maya Standalone
Windows
- Maya 2018
mentalray-standalone-for-Maya-2018-1.2.1-nt-x86-64-vc14-mr3.14.5.3.exe - Maya 2017
mentalray-standalone-for-Maya-2017-1.2-nt-x86-64-vc11-mr3.14.5.1.exe
Linux
- Maya 2018
mentalray-standalone-for-Maya-2018-1.2.1-linux-x86-64-gcc4-mr3.14.5.3.run - Maya 2017
mentalray-standalone-for-Maya-2017-1.2-linux-x86-64-gcc4-mr3.14.5.1.run
macOS
- Maya 2018
mentalray-standalone-for-Maya-2018-1.2.1-macosx-x86-64-clang-mr3.14.5.3.pkg - Maya 2017
mentalray-standalone-for-Maya-2017-1.2-macosx-x86-64-clang-mr3.14.5.1.pkg
NVIDIA Mental Ray for 3ds Max
- 3ds Max 2018 – Plugin
MRMAX2018_v1.0.exe - Mental Ray Standalone (Satellite installer)
MRMAX2018_Satellite_Installer_1.0.exe
Inside mental ray 
thank you so much
[…] render engines on your computer. Arnold comes with Maya. You can download RenderMan from Pixar and Mental Ray from […]
“pluginWin.mel line 290: The specified procedure could not be found.”
every time I try to load the plugin, this message shows up. Any way to solve this problem? Happened for both 2016 and 2018 version of maya.
We have seen similar problems when the software environment was customized a lot, so that mental ray or Maya were forced to search in non-default locations for its components like the „libray“ core library. Does it work when you load the plug-in manually, by using „browse“ in the plugin manager?
Did you get a solution for this ?
I started getting these errors from iRay, the scene is really simple with 600 polys and no textures apart from a small hdri environment and it really shouldn’t be trying to allocate a gigabyte of memory. Yesterday I updated the gpu driver to the newest version (456.38), could it be the cause? Is there anything that can be done?
IRAY 0.135 416 MB error: CUDA device 0: OptiX Prime error (Device rtpModelCreate TL): Unknown error (Function “_rtpModelCreate” caught exception: Encountered a CUDA error: cudaEventCreateWithFlags(&m_eventBegin, cudaEventDisableTiming) returned (77): an illegal memory access was encountered, [197066884])
IRAY 0.135 416 MB error: error on device 0, cannot use this device for rendering
IRAY 0.71 416 MB error: CUDA device 0 (GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER): an illegal memory access was encountered (while allocating memory)
IRAY 0.71 416 MB error: CUDA device 0 (GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER): Failed to allocate 1.02745 GiB
Hi, I guess this about the “iray” render mode in mental ray? You may send the report to mentalray-support(at)nvidia.com for help. Please keep in mind that mental ray development has stopped years ago, and the iray render mode was verified on the GPU models, CUDA version and drivers of its time.
Thank you so much. I just downloaded Mental ray about to install, if any problem, I will get back.
I tried to install MR for 3dsMax but the installer loads a few seconds and then just shuts down. Same for satelitte installer. I guess this is with Win10 or other incompatibilities. I extracted the installer but I am not sure where to copy what in the 3dsMax directory and I got it running but I am missing material previews in standard mat editor. Is it possible to issue a new installer that works under win10? Tested on 2 machines Build 20H2 19042.867
Thanks for sharing these links. This can help.
If anyone is having problems with the 3ds Max plugin not installing (installer briefly flashes open and then closes) delete everything inside the folder “C:/Program Files/NVIDIA Corporation/Installer2” then run the installer again.
Found this info here and it worked fro me https://blog.mentalray.com/2018/06/21/when-the-mental-ray-installer-fails/
Legend! That 100% worked. Thank you for sharing.
I can not downlead mental ray 2017 and 2016
please help me to download mental ray for maya 2017. it not work. may be server problem issue.
Thx for letting us know. We are working on a fix.
Hi all, we have fixed the download links for the older 2017 and 2016 versions of the Mental Ray software for Maya. Please keep in mind, those products have been built many years back for systems and hardware available at the time. Have fun!
sirrr thanks for you & your team for fix this problem :DDD
Hello, Mental Ray for Maya 2016 Windows isnt working anymore. An Update would be incredibly appreciated!!
Hi bob, we’ve gone through some clean-up on the download site recently and will update the DL links in the original post to point to the new locations. Also, we had to drop very old releases and decided to remove the ones for Maya 2016. I hope you can work with Maya 2017 or 2018 instead, which are the ones we’ve updated to the latest mental ray at the time.