Can't get animated ramp to update when batch rendered with mental Ray

[R303]

I made a simple eye shader using a couple of ramps to define the white, iris and pupil of an eye.
All shader elements are maya nodes, and I tried also with a mental ray blinn, but same problem.

I want the pupil to expand and shrink and I do thsi by animating the position of a color entry of a ramp.
It works and when batch rendered with the maya software render it also looks fine, but batch rendered with mental ray, the animated ramp
controling the pupil does not update and just "sits" where it was on the first frame rendered.

Do you know of this problem? And better yet - how to solve it?
(I know of similare issues when batch rendering with mental ray and having animated the visibility attribute).


http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7218/eyemayasoftwarerenderah1.gif

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/7564/eyementalrayrenderzi8.gif

I've attached the scene, so you can have a look at it if you want.

Thank you.

[Shimrod]

With max, I resolved the problem of non-animable visibility track by using a Blend material and animate the mask.

Maybe it could help you to animate your eye... ;)

[R303]

My solution.
I almost forgot about my problem here and I went to the scene again with maya 8.5 and 2008 and damn! I still had the problem.

I now figured that the best thing to do when having a problem is to divide and counquer.

So what I did was to make a new scene and created a sphere. I assigned a lambert to the sphere and a ramp to the lamberts color input.
I the manualy keyframed the color entry position on the ramps color swatches and you know what? Mental Ray did render the ramp animation!

I then realized that maybe Mental Ray can't understand my shading network and breeak somewhere in the dataflow.
So I took my original scene again and baked the ramp and thus bypassing my inputs driving the color entry position and bingo! Now it gets rendered by mental ray.

Note though that I first had to make the color entry position attribute keyable using the Channel Control editor.