> How can I make a camera projection in Maya and render it with Maxwell Render?

The main problem here is that Maxwell Render does not provide native support for camera projections. However, the plug-in can convert the camera projection to a new UV map, which can easily be read by Maxwell Render. An important factor to keep in mind is that with a low number of polygons, the image stretches across the map, and there will typically appear some artefacts in the projection. There are several workarounds to increase the number of polygons. For instance, you can use the "Add Divisions" tool in Maya to increase the polygons of the surface.

> When I export an MXS file from Maya and render it in Studio using the Render
button, I get one of the following errors:

Make sure all your surfaces have the correct normal directions - for
instance, apply a conform from menu Normal> Conform to the object and try
again.

> ERROR: "Parent attribute was not found"

The error "Parent attribute was not found" means the plug-in could not add the "Fresnel color" custom attribute on the native Maya material nodes.
The user won't be able to control the Fresnel color attribute on native Maya materials, but the rest of the functionality will be unaffected.

This error is because of a Maya bug. We've only seen this bug with Maya 7 running on XP 64, which is not a supported combination, because Maya 7 has many problems when running under a 64-bit OS. The only version of Maya that can be used with 64-bit XP is Maya 8. The 32-bit Maya 8 has some minor problems, but it's usable. The 64-bit Maya 8 is the ideal choice for XP 64.

> ERROR: When I hit render I always get the message: Error: Cannot export scene to file C:\DOCUME~1\davidy\LOCALS~1\Temp\mxs82A.tmp

1) Check if you have Maxwell Render installed.

2) If you have it installed, check if you have next environment variable in your system with your path, something similar to this, MAXWELL_ROOT = C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell\ Going to Start menu press RMB in My Computer > Properties. In the dialogue box “Advanced” tab click on Environment variables check it on the two lists. If you don’t have this variable created, you had to create manually. If the problem persists uninstall Maxwell Render and reinstall it again.

>During render setups I get this message // Warning: renderSettingsTabLabel_melToUI: no lookup for 'Maxwell' //

The warning "renderSettingsTabLabel_melToUI: no lookup for 'Maxwell'" is a Maya bug. It appeared in V8.5 when they added multilanguage support for the UI. It doesn’t account for plug-in renderers, and so the code simply checks the name of the active renderer against the list of built-in renderers ("Maya Software", "Maya Hardware", "mental ray") and then prints the warning if it's not there. There's nothing we can do about it, but the warning does not affect the functionality of Maya or the plug-in in any way.