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The following list highlights the most important changes made in version 3.5 of mental ray:
| New final gathering modes |
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mental ray now has four final gathering modes: "automatic",
"multiframe", "3.4", and "strict 3.4". The automatic and multiframe
modes have been greatly simplifi ed and do not require control by
radii, while usually giving superious image quality. The multiframe
mode is specifically designed to avoid flickering artifacts in camera
animations. The 3.4 and strict 3.4 modes are provided for backwards
compatibility.
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| Light lists in instances |
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Light lists have been added to geometric instances to offer a general,
more flexible ways to specify lights for illumination, and for finer
control over shadow casting. The same material may now use different
lights on different geometries. Light lists provide a new, standard
method to pass lights to shaders for illumination; they require,
however, support in the shaders by using the new light iterators.
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| Catmull-Clark meshes |
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Catmull-Clark polygon meshes ("ccmeshes") have been introduced. This
subdivision surface type uses Catmull-Clark rules for smoothening and
supports polygons with arbitrary numbers of vertices.
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| Reloading of .mi files for reduced memory consumption |
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A command line option -reload has been introduced. If this is specified
then mental ray attempts to avoid keeping geometric objects read from
the mi file in memory permanently, but re-read them from disk as
needed. This optimization is not applicable to all scenes and workflows
but may save large amounts of memory on certain complex scenes.
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| Per-face data |
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Per-face data have been introduced for polygonal geometric
objects. Per-face data make it possible to attach arbitrary floating
point data to the primitives. An object may also contain per-primitive
data information to identify the data attached to the primitives.
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| String options |
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Up to version 3.4, options are hardcoded in the .mi syntax and options
data structures. It is now also possible to add new string options in a
more extensible way as arbitrary name - value pairs, where the name of
the option is an arbitrary string, and the value can be of any of a few
basic types.
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| Photon merging |
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A new, optional optimization of global illumination using photon mapping
called photon merging has been implemented. This feature reduces memory
consumption in scenes with complex indirect illumination where were many
photons must be shot but only few of them contribute to the rendered
image, by merging photons in memory which are closer to each other than
a user specified distance threshold. Some scenes which previously could
not be rendered in sufficient quality due to memory size of the shot
photons may be rendered now using this option.
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| Paint shader library |
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A paint shader library has been added with shaders for metallic paint.
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