vray nodes or mats crashing Maya with no vray?

[refract]

So here's the question.. Apparently Vray is crashing scenes at our outsource studio that don't have Vray. I've never seen this. And our td and cg sup
is telling us to stop using Vray. Kinda sucks since we've been using vray for over a year, and we have about 40 licenses, but the outsource studio isn't using vray. I know there are
material converters to vray and back with mental ray, but are there any nodes left behind after those?
I know Maxwell will crash Maya on machines that don't have it installed.

thx

[bigbossfr]

It is not specific to Vray, you can have this with a lot of plugins (sometime Maya refuse to save a scene when you have "unknown nodes").
That is why we have in Maya : File ---> Optimize scene size ---> remove unknown nodes, to clean the scene.

I am surprised that cg sup or td don't know this.

[vlado]

Apparently Vray is crashing scenes at our outsource studio that don't have Vray.

You realize this isn't possible - if V-Ray isn't installed, it couldn't possibly crash What crashes is Maya (and you should report this to Autodesk). It would be best to follow bigbossfr's suggestion and remove unknown nodes before sending the scenes to other people. Or, you could get them to install the demo version of V-Ray, so that they can open the scenes without problems, even if they are not using it. (There's also words to be said about your td and cg sup, but I don't mean to offend anyone )

Best regards,
Vlado

[refract]

Hey Vlado, Damien.. thanks for replying. Yeah, they are saying its Vray crashing Maya at the outsource studio.

Ok.. so if I open up a Vray scene in Maya with Vray materials it shouldn't crash Maya? (I'll have to find a box that has no vray on it and test it on your suggestions) I'd hate to lose Vray on this.

Now they are suggesting, we move towards Renderman...just because Toons uses an older version of it.

..... just as we had everything figured out with Vray.... And now they want us to look dev based upon the outsource studio... and they don't know which one will be doing it. This bothers
me because we spent a year in development getting scenes working for production with Vray using proxy's for heavy scenes and referencing on large scenes for PostMan Pat movie.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will mention it tomorrow.
Btw.. they put the cleaning of the scenes into the hands of a production assistant that barely knows Maya and no Vray.

This is from RGH Entertainment. And Vlado if you want to email me, I'm at JPloyhar@Gmail.com for any suggestions.

Thanks

[bigbossfr]

Ok.. so if I open up a Vray scene in Maya with Vray materials it shouldn't crash Maya?

Like i said, if you open a scene with Vray node, and you haven't Vray installed on the computer, Maya will see the nodes into "unknown nodes".
So if you have crash, it is not specific to Vray because Maya will see the nodes as "unknown nodes", and not "Vray nodes".

You will have this with all another plugins (Arnold, renderman, realflow....). Unknown nodes are unknown nodes.

Btw.. they put the cleaning of the scenes into the hands of a production assistant that barely knows Maya and no Vray.

I think the assistant do not need to know Vray to do : File ---> Optimize scene size ---> remove unknown nodes

Like i said, unknows nodes (from any plugins) are....unknows nodes.

[alainfx]

I think the assistant do not need to know Vray to do : File ---> Optimize scene size ---> remove unknown nodes

Yes, and in case of other plug-ins (Shave, Yeti, RMS, etc...) you also have to remove several entries in PreRenderMel, PostRenderMel, etc...
And also scriptNodes, which create scriptJobs (fortunately it's not very often).

Some plug-ins add so much hidden things (not "unknown nodes") that a mel command is provided to remove everything :
For RMS : rmanPurgePlugin
For Shave : shavePurge

In case you use maya reference files, you obviously have to "clean" the deepest maya files, then go upper each time.