This is more of a pipe dream than a feature request. But if you could pull this off everyone who uses mental ray for big posters would start using Deadline!
Mental Ray sometimes runs out of memory and renders black buckets. If you only end up with a few black buckets you can manually re-render a region to touch it up. My question is can this be automated?
Could Deadline examine a finished render to see if there is an area of black pixels that matches the Mental Ray bucket width, and then automatically re-render that region?
That bug sound strange. We render a lot of large image with Mental Ray in Maya and I never saw this bug. We sometime render 10K plus image using the tile rendering, it always works pretty well. We have a render farm with a lot of ram, so it might help. But I find this strange this bug.
Are you using Mental Ray standalone, or are you using it with 3dsmax, Maya or XSI? If it’s the latter case, you could use the Tile Rendering feature that we support to send regions of an image to different machines. This might help get around the memory issue and prevent the problem from happening in the first place. In Deadline 3.1, we will have a Blowup option for Tile Rendering with 3dsmax, which renders the region at a smaller resolution and then blows it up to the correct one. This also will help reduce the amount of memory used during the render.