Innovative Shader Creation Tool Improves the Content Creation Workflow; Bundled with NVIDIA FX Composer 2
SAN FRANCISCO and BERLIN; July 31, 2007: mental images®, a global leader in rendering software and other tools for animators, visual effects artists and other professionals who create highest-quality imagery and visualizations, today announced that mental mill™ Artist Edition is now available. This advanced technology for the creation of shaders across all popular platforms is bundled at no extra cost as part of the FX Composer™ 2 product from NVIDIA.
A standalone version of mental mill with additional features for debugging and shader programming will be available from mental images in the fourth quarter of 2007.
The mental mill Artist Edition software is a new shader creation tool for all levels of expertise. Using an intuitive graphical interface, mental mill enables artists and other creative team members to develop, test and maintain shaders with real-time feedback - without the need for programming skills that are usually required. Complex cooperating shader networks for generating photorealistic effects can be created.
mental mill supports MetaSL™, the universal meta shader language developed by mental images. Using MetaSL, shaders are only created once independent of the target platforms and then compiled into highly efficient code for execution on general purpose CPUs as well as on GPUs or custom processors.
"By providing creative control to non-technical individuals, thereby eliminating the need for the hand-coding and debugging of multiple source code variants of each shader for various platforms and environments, the entire workflow is streamlined," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. "The result is a vastly increased productivity throughout the entire shader and look development process."
The benefits of this technology can also be applied beyond the visual effects and entertainment fields. The visual and interactive editing approach of mental mill will benefit a broad range of new users such as those in engineering, product design and marketing.
"As our core customers keep pushing the boundaries of realism and performance, their project complexity and investment demands increase. It is a shared goal of mental images and NVIDIA to simplify this process, thus broadening the accessibility of these technologies to a wide range of new industries and non-technical design professionals," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA.
NVIDIA FX Composer 2, which includes mental mill Artist Edition, is available for download at: developer.nvidia.com/FXComposer.
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About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation is the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies. The Company creates innovative, industry-changing products for computing, consumer electronics, and mobile devices. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.
About mental images
mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing rendering software to the entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization, architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images. The company's main product is the Academy Award® winning photorealistic rendering software mental ray® which runs on a wide variety of platforms ranging from networks of workstations to parallel supercomputers, producing images of unsurpassed realism. mental ray was initially released in 1989 and has been used in the production of several hundred major motion pictures. Leading visual effects companies and studios, such as Buf Compagnie, Digital Domain, DreamWorks Animation, Lucasfilm Animation, Industrial Light and Magic, The Mill, The Moving Picture Company, The Orphanage, ReelFX, and Sony Pictures Imageworks are among mental images's largest customers. Additionally, in the CAD field mental ray is used by the world's leading automobile and aircraft manufactures to accelerate the design of new products. - mental images's new product RealityServer® enables interactive manipulation and visualization of existing and newly created 3D content. Applications based on it permit thousands of users to simultaneously and optionally collaboratively access and interact with original 3D data. Since the original content remains on the server, access to data and user policies are easily secured and managed centrally.
mental images GmbH is a privately held company based in Berlin, Germany, with a wholly owned subsidiary mental images, Inc. in San Francisco, California and an office in Stockholm, Sweden. For more information, visit www.mentalimages.com.
mental images Contacts:
United States
Elizabeth Olson
Double Forte Marketing + Communications
e-mail: eolson@double-forte.com
Telephone: +1 (415) 863.4900 x 8116
Other Areas
Silvia Hanko
mental images GmbH
Fasanenstrasse 81
D 10623 Berlin, Germany
e-mail: office@mental.com
Telephone: +49 (30) 31 59 97-0
Telefax: +49 (30) 31 59 97-33
www.mentalimages.com
NVIDIA Corporation:
Ken Brown
e-mail: kebrown@nvidia.com
Telephone: +1 (408) 486.2626