From: Greg Ercolano <erco@(email surpressed)>
Subject: [OSX/ADMIN]: With Maya 2013 + OSX: Cannot open renderer description
   Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:26:26 -0400

> We recently installed vray and are trying to use "Render -r vray .."
> It seems we get this error both from the terminal and within rush:
>
>     $ Render -r vray -proj /server/vol1/common/renderTests/VrayTest/ -s 1 -e 1 -b 1 /server/vol1/common/renderTests/VrayTest/scenes/VrayTestScene_Maya2013_001.mb
>     Cannot open renderer description file "vrayRenderer.xml"
>
> Is this a known problem?


     OK, looking into this with you, we found that Maya 2013 on OSX
     has two /rendererDesc/ sub directories:

1) /Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/Maya.app/Contents/bin/rendererDesc/
2) /Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/Maya.app/Contents/MacOS/rendererDesc/

     Apparently Maya uses (1), but based on our tests, it seems vray
     only installed its vrayRenderer.xml in (2) and skipped (1).

     Also, we did find the Vray installer seemed to create a "stray"
     rendererDesc file under the maya2013 directory:

3) /Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/bin/rendererDesc
                                  -----------------
                                  Creates these two subdirectories,
                                  and puts a copy of vrayRenderer.xml into it.

     So where the vray installer seems to save two vrayRenderer.xml files,
     it puts them in (2) and (3) instead of (1) and (2).

     I'm not sure if this is specific to your installation (eg. possibly
     your own custom environment variables that might be confusing the
     vray installer), or if this is a problem with the vray installer itself.

     Anyway, we were able to solve the problem by setting this environment
     variable in the submit script:

$ENV{MAYA_RENDER_DESC_PATH} = "/Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/Maya.app/Contents/MacOS/rendererDesc";

     ..and this setting seemed to work in the shell as well:

export MAYA_RENDER_DESC_PATH=/Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/Maya.app/Contents/MacOS/rendererDesc

     ..which helped maya find the vrayRenderer.xml file, and all was well from there.