Mental Ray Render Issue Solved!!

For the longest time, the Buggy model was plagued with render-crashes when rendered in Mental Ray. Originally it was thought to have been the heavy 2.5 million polygons in the model file, but even optimized down to a 500k poly model, it still exhibited the same crashes. It took a bit of sleuthing, but I've narrowed it down to the file textures used to drive the dirt maps.

The solution to the issue was to use memory mapped textures. From the Maya help file:

"...memory mapping is based on the concept that the image data on disk does not require decoding or data type conversion, but is available in the exact format that mental ray uses internally during rendering."

There is a utility that comes with Maya called "imf_copy". The utility is used for converting file textures to other supported formats, including one called '.map'. The '.map' format seems to run about the same size as an uncompressed .tif image.

I've tested a few renders after the conversion to .map textures, and mental ray hasn't spat one out yet. Going to rigorously test it under more memory intensive conditions (final gather + global illumination), but it's looking good.

Render crashing problem solved.