mental images Software Developers Receive Academy Award®

Berlin/San Francisco, January 8, 2003 - The developers of mental ray®, the world's leading high end rendering software from mental images®, have been awarded an Academy Award® by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Rendering software is used to "translate" 3D scene data into humanly visible, realistic images and the Academy commended mental ray as "a highly programmable computer-graphics renderer incorporating ray tracing and global illumination to realistically simulate the behavior of light in computer-generated imagery." The Awards will be presented at a ceremony on March 1, 2003.

In addition to awarding "Oscars®" to actors and movies, the Academy each year presents awards to individuals and companies for their scientific and technical contributions to filmmaking. The Academy formally made the award to "Thomas Driemeyer and to the mathematicians, physicists and software engineers of mental images for their contributions to the mental ray rendering software for motion pictures."

"The Academy Award is a wonderful recognition of our work", said Thomas Driemeyer, the chief architect of mental ray . "This is an appreciation of the increasing relevance of our fundamental research and software development for the movie industry," added Rolf Herken, President and Director of R&D at mental images. "The film industry is becoming increasingly dependent on technology to achieve ambitious creative goals, and mental ray is well positioned to become the rendering software of choice among Hollywood's leading studios."

As innovative technologies further influence the movie industry, mental ray has become an indispensable tool for many filmmakers, almost as necessary as a camera. The world's leading cinematographers use mental ray to generate images of unsurpassed realism in visual effects and with films that are produced entirely using digital techniques. mental ray was initially released in 1989 and has been used in the production of over 100 major motion pictures such as:

• "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets"
• "The Matrix" (including its 2003 sequels "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions")
• "Spider Man"
• "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones"

as well as in numerous earlier motion pictures including "AI - Artificial Intelligence", "Jurassic Park III'," "Panic Room," "Fight Club," and "The City of Lost Children."

But mental ray is not only used in Hollywood. About half of the company's business is related to Computer Aided Design (CAD). When new cars or aircraft are conceived, design processes are speeded up immensely when designers, engineers and production planners see and work with photorealistic images of future products, rather than line drawings and mockups. For example, mental ray technology is tightly integrated into CATIA®from Dassault Systèmes, the globally leading CAD and PLM product for the automobile and aerospace industry, and it is also used in conjunction with AutoCad®from Autodesk. Users include BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Honda, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and many other Fortune 100 industrial companies.

mental images was founded by Rolf Herken in Berlin, Germany in 1986 with the goal to develop the world's best rendering software. Extensive and ongoing mathematical research is the basis for mental ray . The software is optimized for use with the leading design and animation software products and is distributed on an OEM basis with these products, including Maya®from Alias|Wavefront, Softimage|XSI®from Avid/Softimage and 3ds max®from Autodesk/discreet.

Based on the same fundamental technologies used in mental ray ,RealityServerª is the latest product from mental images for server-based 3D collaboration solutions in intranets and the Internet. With RealityServer it is possible to generate highquality, photorealistic images on a server based on existing data and content, such as animated film sequences, videogames or CAD models. While the original data and content remain securely on the server, multiple users - engineers as well as kids playing games - are able to view 3D images and interactively manipulate their underlying data in a cooperative fashion from any stationary terminal or mobile device with a browser and a Web connection.

About mental images: mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing rendering software to the entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization, architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images. The main product of the company is the high performance photorealistic rendering software mental ray®which is capable of running on a wide variety of platforms ranging from workstations and networks of workstations to parallel supercomputers, producing images of unsurpassed realism. mental images GmbH & Co. KG is a privately held company based in Berlin, Germany, with a subsidiary in San Francisco, California.

See www.mentalimages.com for more information and selected works produced with mental ray.

Contact:

Rachel Yarmey
Sparkpr
87 McLea Court
San Francisco, CA 94103, USA
e-mail: rachel@sparkpr.com
Telephone: +1 (415) 962-8200 x241
Telefax: +1 (415) 522-0330
www.sparkpr.com

Silvia Hanko
mental images GmbH & Co. KG
Fasanenstrasse 81, D 10623 Berlin, Germany
Telephone: +49 (30) 31 59 97-0
Telefax: +49 (30) 31 59 97-33
office@mental.com
www.mentalimages.com