Arnold freezes rendering xgen

Hi guys,

Really hoping someone here can help. I'm working on a project, lookdev for the skin shading was done, so I move to grooming some fur. I hid the high definition geo, and extracted a low poly geo of the scalp, groomed and everything looks as it should in the viewport preview. I enabled Arnold renderer in the output, I use xgen core as I'm more familiar with it, applied ai standard hair shader to the groom description, and black surface shader on the scalp geo. I have everything but the scene lights hidden. For some reason the moment I open Arnold Renderview and run it, it freezes on "Exporting Arnold Scene".. If I hide the xgen collection and render everything is fine again. The moment I unhide, preview an xgen description, then hit render, it freezes on "Updating Arnold Scene."

It's quite bizarre, causes the entire app to hang, Maya's output console window still functions and reads "Fatal Error" and attempts to autosave the file in temp folder. I have to close Maya via task manager every time. I am using Maya 2019.2 -- and native MtoA Arnold renderer. I lowered the density to just 30k primitives to see if that helps but it doesn't. I have a 6c CPU and 64gb of ram, but it's not a hardware issue, since task manager shows no CPU usage by Maya during the process. So something is causing the process to freeze right at the get go.

Hopefully that's enough information for someone to throw some ideas and troubleshoot with me. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!

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Update: again, bizarre! but solved the issue.. well more of a workaround. I used Maya's native renderer, made sure it's set to Arnold Renderer, and the fur rendered instantly. After, I launched Arnold's Renderview and running ipr finally worked! had a bit of a hiccup at the start, but then rendered without issues. Not sure if others have or may encounter this issue, so maybe I'll keep this up..