Regardless of which renderer I use (mental ray or maya software), my scene will render fine for a couple of frames, then hang on 100% on the last frame for a few seconds, then declare “rendering complete” even though it’s far from it. I’m using IBL, so I really need to get mental ray working, though maya software is having the same problem.
If I look in the render log, I see a line: “Fatal Error. Attempting to save in…”
All my scene has in it is two cameras (stereo setup, imported from Syntheyes), two particle systems cached, with spheres instanced to them for blood droplets.
I’ve looked all over and can’t find a solution to my specific problem.
I’ve ensured that my firewalls aren’t blocking maya.
My sequence runs from 1 to 173, but it would hang up after frame 46. If I manually set the render range to start at 47, it halts immediately, but if I set it to something much higher like 100, it’ll get 2 frames deep, then stop working again. It seems to render just fine when I render a single frame at a time in the viewport but… 173 frames is a bit much to be doing that with. I’ve also tried right clicking the .ma and choosing ‘render’ but that gives me the same “fatal error” message.
I’ve tried starting a brand-new scene and simply importing the other scene into it. That made it fail even faster! Only got to frame 10 before it failed. 
I haven’t yet tried re-installing maya, as that would be a drastic, last-ditch measure to fix this, and I don’t feel I’ve exhausted all options just yet… whatever they may be. What are things I could be trying to diagnose this? I apologize if this is a silly question, I’m still new to maya.
