From: Greg Ercolano <erco@(email surpressed)>
Subject: Note regarding Maya 7.0 + Mental Ray Standalone
   Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:46:47 -0700

Apparently the Maya 7.0 version of the Mental Ray Standalone product
is not out yet (as of this writing, 08/25).. so current users of
Maya 7.0 expecting to use your existing 3.4.1.5 standalone version
of Mental Ray should beware; you may not be able to render mi files
generated from 7.0 until you upgrade to the mray standalone product
as well.

I am assuming rendering with maya's built in mental ray plugin works
fine, and it's just there is apparently a delay between the release
of maya, and the compatible release of the standalone mray product.

I spent a good 2 hours debugging with the customer before I realized
it had to be something wrong with version compatibility, and the
customer was able to verify this problem via Alias support quite quickly,
their support responding to the customer's error messages with this
excerpt pasted to me via a chat window:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[date: 08/25/2005]

Hello Robin,

 Check to see that you are not creating this file with Maya 7 and trying to
 render it with standalone 3.4 as they are not compatible.  There is not a
 currently available version of standalone that works with Maya7.0 files.

 You must do the conversion with Maya 6.5 and then render these files with
 standalone 3.4
------------------------------------------------------------------------

So FYI all you folks using standalone mray and upgrading to Maya 7.0.

Greg Ercolano wrote:

Apparently the Maya 7.0 version of the Mental Ray Standalone product
is not out yet (as of this writing, 08/25).. so current users of
Maya 7.0 expecting to use your existing 3.4.1.5 standalone version
of Mental Ray should beware; you may not be able to render mi files
generated from 7.0 until you upgrade to the mray standalone product
as well.

	Soon after this post, Alias made "Mental Ray Standalone 3.4.5"
	(compatible with Maya 7.0) available as a 'maintenance release'
	of the standalone product.

	So I /believe/ if you purchased "Mray Standalone" for maya 6.5,
	and recently upgraded to Maya 7.0, the new Mray Standalone
	is available to you as a maintenance release; I'm not sure
	if extra cost is involved; contact Alias for details.

	I do believe your old mray standalone licenses will work
	with the new maintenance release.