As you may be aware if you follow me on Twitter we’ve been having some terrible trouble with rendering on Mental Ray for Maya after upgrading to the Macintosh Mavericks OS.

There seemed to be a conflict with multiple thread renders and the new Macintosh architecture.

We so far seem to have cleared the issue.

We completely uninstalled all parts of Maya, on the problem computers by dragging the Maya folder in the applications to the trash and then finding the Autodesk preferences folder in Library/Preferences(Library appears when you Alt-click the Go menu), and removing that too. Probably best keep a back up of that one.

Then do a fresh install of the new Maya 2015 Sp3.

It’s easier than uninstalling Mavericks anyways.

We had this in place for 3 days now and the constant hangs seem to be over.

Fingers crossed.

Edit: Scrub that. Still having freeze problems. Thinking of now striping the Mavericks machines to take them back to OS 10.8, as we are having no problems with them. If anyone else is making progress on this please let me know.

Edit 2: I tried CGBeige‘s script in the render farm, but it didn’t seem to stop the issue. So I have reverted to enabling “Overtime Kill Ratio” on Smedge (the software we use to managed our render farm). I set this to 3, so that if the work for the chunk goes 3 times over the work unit time it kills the chunk and starts again., which is good enough to kick it into gear and means I can sleep, without looking over the render farm all night.

Oh, and I have raised an official case ID with Autodesk, in case you were wondering.

Edit 3: Just found this post on Inside Mental Ray, there is an SP4, and they claim to have fixed it.

“We are glad to announce that we were able to remove the cause for freezes and crashes on Mac OS X version 10.9”

So we’ll see.