Products of mental images

mental images® conducts original research to create technologies which anticipate and meet market needs. Products developed from these technologies in a number of categories are:

RealityServer®

RealityServer is the unique server-based, scalable infrastructure software platform for creating and deploying 3D Web Services and other applications and application services for interactive and possibly collaborative remote creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D digital content of essentially unlimited complexity. Users can, for instance, access 3D models based on original CAD data, participate in collaborative online design reviews or participate in multi-player games from any device with only a browser and Internet connection - including mobile devices and smart phones. more ...

mental ray®

mental ray is the world leading, Academy Award® winning, high performance, photorealistic rendering software. It produces images of unsurpassed realism for digital content creation and design in the areas of entertainment, product design and data visualization, including such applications as visual effects for motion pictures, full-length feature animations, content creation for computer games, Computer Aided Design (CAD), product design and styling, architectural design, lighting design, fluid flow simulation, seismic data studies and medical imaging. mental ray features the most advanced, patented and proprietary ray tracing and rasterizer algorithms. It supports 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and parallel computer architectures, including networks of computers, for maximum performance. mental ray is the first rendering software that combines the physically correct simulation of the behavior of light with full programmability for the creation of any imaginable visual phenomenon. mental ray is available as a standalone product and in the form of a library for integration into software products. more ...

mental mill™

mental mill enables artists and other professionals to develop, test and maintain shaders and complex shader graphs for hardware and software rendering through an intuitive graphical user interface with real-time visual feedback - without the need for programming skills. Software companies can incorporate parts or all of mental mill in the form of software libraries into their own digital content creation and design products. Shaders are automatically generated in the MetaSL™ language and can be modified easily. mental images designed MetaSL to encompass the expressive power of all current and future shading languages and shading language standards. Complex cooperating shader graphs can be encapsulated into Phenomena™. MetaSL shaders and Phenomena are valuable and future-proof assets. They do not need to be re-authored for different target platforms. The built-in proprietary mental mill compiler technology generates abstract syntax tree representations of shaders and Phenomena. These are then translated by back-end plug-in modules into various dedicated or general purpose target languages for compilation to one or more target platforms with the respective native compilers, including CPUs (C++), GPUs (Cg, GLSL, HLSL) and other current and future platforms, eliminating the need to re-engineer and debug shaders and Phenomena for each of them. Whenever possible, mental mill produces real-time interactive visual feedback using real-time compilation of the resulting code and its immediate execution on the target platform. mental mill ships with support for Cg, HLSL, and GLSL, as well as C++ for mental ray and RealityServer. Back-end plug-ins for other targets such as special purpose processors and other software renderers can be developed by third parties using the mental mill API. more ...

mental matter®

mental matter is an extremely versatile and powerful modeling library comprised of modular components which support Hierarchical Subdivision Surface (HSDS) and Free-Form Surface (FFS) modeling techniques. Several different types of free-form surfaces, such as Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces, are supported. The HSDS representation allows for arbitrarily complex geometrical objects, traditionally assembled from many individual small patches that are carefully stitched or blended together, to be represented easily by a single subdivision surface. In addition, the HSDS representation supports high interactivity rates for 3D animation and other applications. An optional module complementing mental matter provides the revolutionary Shape-By-Shading™ (SBS) modeling technology. It allows artists to create 3D geometry in HSDS representation interactively by shading with an electronic pen on a computer tablet or Tablet PC in place of using traditional pencil and paper. SBS can be integrated as a plug-in into any DCC or CAD application that contains mental matter. In addition to offering modeling capabilities, mental matter also supports conversions between surface types, for example bidirectional conversion between NURBS surfaces and hierarchical subdivision surfaces, so that multiple modeling techniques can be used on the same surface. For example, surfaces can be imported from traditional NURBS modeling tools to perform modeling operations on the HSDS representation and the result exported back to the NURBS modeler or to a machining device. Other capabilities, such as mesh simplification, are also provided to prepare input data for modeling. more ...

mental mesh™

mental mesh is a software library providing the most efficient 3D geometry compression algorithm currently available. It allows for large amounts of data reduction in a variety of applications, such as the transmission of 3D data on mobile devices. The extremely efficient pre-processing and scene data optimization algorithms which mental mesh provides can be applied to software or graphics hardware rendering, and allow even the most complex 3D scenes to be rendered. more ...

mental queue™

mental queue is a distributed process management system that can control all tasks of an entire production or computing service pipeline. It efficiently distributes large and varying numbers of possibly highly interdependent rendering and other tasks. Even the largest networks of machines and any number of users are supported. The unique architecture of mental queue enables node management across different operating systems and across interconnected production networks in different locations. Resources and tasks are dynamically allocated in the most efficient way possible at all times. In particular, mental queue permits optimal control of mental ray based rendering pipelines. more ...