About mental ray

mental ray® generates images of outstanding quality and unsurpassed realism and achieves scalable performance through the exploitation of parallelism on both multiprocessor machines and across networks of machines. The software uses advanced and proprietary acceleration and recursive sampling techniques for faster rendering on even the smallest, single processor machines.

mental ray accepts scene data using its .mi scene description language in either ASCII or mixed ASCII/binary form, whose specification is precisely defined in the documentation. Supported geometric primitives include polygons, trimmed free-form surfaces, hair, and subdivision surfaces (in conjunction with the mental matter® product). Run-time linking of user-supplied C and C++ code allows the creation of procedural textures, materials, new lighting models, volume and lens effects, control of global illumination simulation through photon shaders and the Photon Map™ as well as displacement maps. 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 is also available as a library for direct integration. It incorporates significant developments of the European Union's DESIRE project such as a novel proprietary parallel rendering algorithm and a distributed database. The message passing based software is capable of running on single processor workstations and on shared memory parallel platforms as well as on distributed memory architectures such as heterogeneous networks of workstations and scalable parallel supercomputers.

mental ray is the first rendering software which combines the physically correct simulation of the behavior of light with full programmability for the creation of any imaginable visual phenomena.

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™ in the Phenomenon Creator™ and Phenomenon Editor™, 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 Softimage Co. (a division of Avid Technology, Inc.), and is available in the Softimage|XSI product.

A fully interactive integration of mental ray with a graphical user interface for the creation and editing of visual phenomena by means of mental ray Phenomena in Maya's Hypershade work space, 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 Alias Systems, Inc. and Autodesk, and is integrated into all Maya products by Autodesk.

mental ray has been integrated into Softimage|3D and Softimage|XSI, Autodesk 3ds max and VIZ, Autodesk Maya, Side Effects Software's Houdini 5, SolidWorks PhotoWorks 2, and Dassault Système'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.

Functional Overview PDF-download (120 kByte)