mental mill® enables artists and other professionals to develop, test and maintain shaders and complex shader graphs for GPU and CPU rendering through an intuitive graphical user interface with real-time visual feedback without the need for programming skills.
Software companies can incorporate parts or all of mental mill in the form of software libraries into their own digital content creation and design products. Shaders are automatically generated in the MetaSL® language and can be modified easily.
mental mill supports CgFX, HLSL, and GLSL, and runs natively in mental ray and RealityServer. Back-end plug-ins for other targets such as special purpose processors and other software renderers can be developed by third parties using the mental mill Integrator Edition.
mental mill Standard Edition
The mental mill Standard Edition enables users to author MetaSL shaders, visually debug shader code, and build shader graphs and Phenomena all through a graphical user interface. The resulting shaders can be used in DCC and CAD applications through the supported, customizable back-end formats such as CgFX, HLSL and GLSL. With the included mental ray preview plug-in, users can preview their shaders with a photo-realistic raytracer. The Standard Edition offers a solution for users who want both the creative control of writing their own shaders and developing shaders from existing nodes, the ability to export shaders to other shading languages, and to share shaders with other Standard Edition users. The mental mill Standard Edition is a standalone application available from our website here.
mental mill Artist Edition
Users of Artist Edition can quickly assemble complex shader graphs or Phenomena from the provided library of shaders and modify the parameters. It is bundled with the Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010 so that users can render natively in the 3ds Max viewport and in mental ray. The Artist Edition offers a solution for users who want to visually create complex shaders in 3ds Max without writing a single line of code.
mental mill Integrator Edition
The Integrator Edition offers a solution for users who wish to integrate mental mill with their own products including, game engines, DCC or CAD applications or renderers. The mental mill software development kit (SDK) is available directly from mental images. For more information about how to purchase a license to the library, please contact us directly here.