| Year | Events |
|---|---|
2005 | Autodesk and mental images expanded license and development agreement |
2004 | mental images acquired Cycore's Cult3D technology for integration into RealityServer®. |
2003 | mental images completed a US$6 million investment round led by ViewPoint Ventures and another large international private equity investor to expand its product offerings to include the server-based 3D collaboration platform RealityServer®. |
2003 | Academy Award® presented to the “mathematicians, physicists and software engineers of mental images for their contributions to the mental ray rendering software for motion pictures”. In announcing the award, The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 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.” |
2002 | Completion and release of mental ray 3.1. |
2002 | Completion and release of RealityServer 1.0 beta. |
2002 | mental images enters into a long-term licensing and custom support and development agreement with Industrial Light and Magic, one of the worlds leading visual effects companies. More… |
2002 | mental images and AliasWavefront announce strategic alliance and the inclusion of mental ray as the fully-integrated rendering solution in AliasWavefront’s Digital Content Creation software Maya®. |
2002 | mental images selected to join the CAD 3D Working Group with a view to establishing a common standard for handling 3D data in a web environment in Computer Aided Design. |
2001 | start of mental ray 3.1 development. Primary new features are micropolygon displacement, parallel subobject tessellation for subdivision surfaces, user defined area light source types (arbitrary geometry area light source), supersampling settings can be set individually for each object, IES light profile, HDR (high dynamic range) image format, 3D multipass rendering for 3D compositing, multi-segment motion blur, hair rendering, thread local storage facilities for shaders |
2001 | completion of mental ray 3.0 development |
1999 | integration of mental ray 2.1 into SoftimageXSI and 3ds max. |
1999 | completion of the European Union ESPRIT project DESIRE II (1997-1999) to research dataflow architectures and global illumination. |
1997 | start of the mental ray 2.1 implementation. The primary new feature is global illumination and the corresponding extension of the shader API. |
1996 | completion of mental ray 2.0 for integration into Softimage’s next generation 3D software package (then called Sumatra, now SoftimageXSI). |
1995 | start of the mental ray 2.0 project, a complete re-implemention of mental ray, now based on a distributed editable scene database resulting from the ESPRIT project prototype |
1994 | completion of the European Union ESPRIT project DESIRE (1992-1994) to research scalable parallelism applications. |
1993 | integration of mental ray 1.9 into Softimage’s Softimage3D animation software package. First C language based shader interface implementation, development of contour rendering capabilities and first use of these in cartoon animation motion picture production. First use of 3D generated contour information to drive hand-drawn 2D characters. |
1990-1992 | development of the first version of mental ray’s geometry module for inclusion in Wavefront Technologies’ Advanced Visualizer 3D animation software package and definition of the extended .obj format for Wavefront Technologies. The geometry module becomes part of mental ray 1.6. |
1989 | launch of first commercial mental ray release. |
1986 | mental images is founded in April; start of the mental ray project. The first versions of the software were influenced, tested and used for production by mental images’s then operating large commercial computer animation division, led by three of today’s leading Visual Effects Supervisors: John Andrew Berton (1986-1989), 2000 Academy Award Winner John Nelson (1987-1989), and 1996 and 2000 Academy Award Nominee Stefen Fangmeier (1988-1990). |