Have you tried rendering with scanline to troubleshoot?

And with mental ray, you probably just need final gather, no global 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

I’ll try scanline later today and see.
I’m only using FG with mental ray. I only used global illumination with Finalrender and that took forever.

Thanks for helping, I’ll post the scanline result when it’s ready.

Firk.

Firk
Max 2010-2011 (64)
Nvidia quadro 4000
W7

I’m sorry, it seems I have messed things up a bit: The preview I made that looked good, was from wavelet files. When making preview from post (retime) files it’s back to stop motion animation again, just like the renders…

I see now that there’s 3 frames in post where the smoke dissapears with the exception of a tiny dot of smoke by the emitter. The 3 frames are 87-89 which is where my renders crash…
I have checked wavelet preview again and can not find any frames where there’s just a tiny dot of smoke and there’s no frames missing…

I’ll try to run the simulation again from Default through Wavelet too Post to see if it helps.

Firk
Max 2010-2011 (64)
Nvidia quadro 4000
W7