mental ray® is a rendering software which generates images of outstanding quality and unsurpassed realism. It combines the physically correct simulation of the behavior of light with full programmability for the creation of any imaginable visual phenomena. The software uses advanced and proprietary acceleration and sampling techniques for faster rendering on even the smallest, single processor machines. At the same time, mental ray achieves optimal scalable performance through the exploitation of parallelism on both multiprocessor machines and across networks of machines.

mental ray is founded on a network transparent scene and rendering database. Scene data can be provided as files using the .mi scene description language, in either ASCII or mixed ASCII/binary form. The supported geometric primitives include triangle and arbitrary polygon meshes, trimmed free-form surfaces, hierarchical subdivision surfaces and fast subdivision meshes, and specialized hair geometry. User-supplied functions, typically written in MetaSL® or C/C++ programming language, allow to procedurally create textures, materials, new lighting models, volume and lens effects, as well as geometry and displacement. They can also be used to control global illumination simulation through photon shaders and the Photon Map™. The free-form surface processing and approximation capabilities, and the mathematical accuracy of the software are superior to those of competing rendering software products.

mental ray comes with a number of standard shader packages, many of them in source code. They range from shaders for basic illumination tasks to comprehensive and optimized packages for common applications, like shaders for typical materials used in architecture and design, subsurface scattering and car paint shaders, as well as physical sun and sky lighting.

mental ray is available as a standalone product as well as a library for direct integration into other applications.

A fully interactive integration of mental ray with a graphical user interface for creation and editing of visual phenomena by means of mental ray Phenomena™, creation and editing of the lighting, full control of all rendering related options and parameters, and management of the rendering process has been developed in cooperation with Autodesk (and former Avid/Softimage), and is available in the Autodesk Softimage and Autodesk Maya products.

mental ray has been integrated into content creation applications used in the media and entertainment industry, like Autodesk Softimage, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Side Effects Software's Houdini 5, and into CAD applications for architecture, design, and manufacturing, like Autodesk VIZ, Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit, SolidWorks PhotoWorks 2, Maticad DomuS3D and Dassault Systиme's CATIA V4 and V5 products. A number of translators and translator plug-ins allow for using mental ray in conjuction with various 3D modeling and animation front-end systems.


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