I am trying to render a light bulb using mental ray and also using glare. I have my glare setup so that it gets stronger and progressivly dimmer over the course of 20 frames. In the viewport it shows this properly, and the spinners for the glare shader’s intensity looks like it is working correctly, however when I see this animation rendered the glare effect simply does not show up. Any ideas?

Everything works correctly over here.

Which values did you animate? Did you make sure the shader in your material editor is instanced in the camera effects rollout? Do you have anything in your scene that would create a noticeable glare?

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

I animated the glare values, so that they start at 0 and gradually increase by the 20th frame. Yes the shader is instanced. I have a self illuminated material applied to the bulb, that starts at 0 intensity at frame 1 and gradually increases by the 20th frame. When I render the 20th frame only, the glare shows perfectly, but when I animate the sequence, nothing happens to the glare or the self illum. I noticed that by starting with the highest intensity at frame 0 and decrease this value to 0 by the 20th frame, it seems to work. Ideally I would not like to do this though.

What type of material are you using for self illumination?

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC