mental ray for maya job failing with error

[Mlager8]

I have a short animation to render that for one reason or another will not cache out it's fluid simulations in maya, for this reason I am rendering the scene all on one node with only 1 subjob so it renders sequentially. I am submitting the job through the maya qube plugin. The job processes and fails yet finishes the render. This is the error:

ERROR: mel command [mayaBatchRenderProcedure(0, "", "defaultRenderLayer", "mentalRay", "-v 5 -lic ns"); system ("C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe -e \"sleep 1\"");] failed
(Mayatomr.Shader) : mentalrayIblShape1: no shader assigned in light
setAttr defaultRenderLayer.renderable 0
setAttr Studio_Shot_Cam:camera1.renderable 0
ERROR: there were at least [1] errors in processing this frame
WARNING: maximum tries of 1 exhausted... at C:\Program Files (x86)\pfx\jobtypes/maya/MayaJob.pm line 375.
WARNING: ...subjob bailing...

Because I was at the time only rendering one frame this was fine, but once I submitted my 500+ frame job it would fail on the first 2 frames, then stop all together, even with the expand flag entered in the submission form. I am lost, any help would be appreciated.

[Scot Brew]

For simulations, since you likely want the sequential cache, you will likely best be served by using the "Maya Batchrender (file) or (mentalray)" jobtype and have it run on a single machine.  This will call Maya's "Render" commandline just as one would do directly from the commandline (or BatchRender menu) on a machine.  Specify the "Execution" to "Split into n Partitions" with 1 as the value.

You can do this from the QubeGUI's "Submit->Maya BatchRender" menu item.  To do this from within Maya, you can run File->Install AppUI->Maya BatchRender to have it add a menu item in Maya under the Render menu.

If the run-up time is not too long, then you can have multiple machines each render a segment of the sequence.  Up the CPUs (which actually means render processes) and then up the "Execution" number value so that it will split the entire frame range into <n> number of segments.