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The following list highlights the most important changes made in version 3.4 of mental ray:
| Rasterizer |
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A new rasterizer has been implemented for fast rendering of directly visible
objects and objects seen through transparency.
It is specifically designed for
efficient rendering
of complex scenes in high visual quality, with and without motion
blur and displacement, where ray tracing effects are of lower importance.
This implementation replaces the "rapid motion" mode
as a first-hit renderer. |
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The rasterizer is loosely based on a micro polygon architecture in order to limit
shading time while at the same time providing high quality
anti-aliasing.
It is also well suited for large amounts of geometry.
The rasterizer can be combined with ray tracing for shadows, reflections, refractions, global illumination,
and other ray tracing effects.
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| Final Gathering Enhancements |
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Final gathering quality and performance have been significantly enhanced in version 3.4. The sampling and interpolation algorithms haven been improved to provide higher quality in still images and in animations in less time than in version 3.3. |
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Final gathering has also been extended to support multiple
diffuse bounces (final gathering can also be combined with photon mapping
to simulate arbitrary light paths).
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| Frame Buffers |
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Frame buffers are now by default stored on disk during rendering, allowing for
arbitrarily many and arbitrarily large frame buffers. This supports
work flows separating many layers and passes to be combined in
compositing.
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| Hair Rendering Improvements |
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Larger amount of hair can now be rendered in the rasterizer.
This has been achieved by splitting of large hair objects into
smaller portions of optimal size.
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| Hardware Rendering Improvements |
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Many improvements have been made in hardware rendering,
including order independent transparency,
high quality anti-aliasing,
and 2D hardware motion blur.
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| Object and instance flags |
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Object and instance flags have been generalized
to provide flexible, efficient control over aspects like visibility, shadows, reflections, and participation
in global illumination per object or per object instance.
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| Efficient Geometry Representation |
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The internal representation of tessellated geometry in memory has been
optimized for less
memory consumption and higher cache efficiency. This allows to render
larger scenes in less time.
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| OpenEXR Support |
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Full support of high dynamic range images in the OpenEXR version 1.2
format, including
texture tiling, texture caching, and arbitrary image channels.
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