The time required to tune a scene is signficantly reduced with Unified Sampling

• No need for individual sampling settings on elements like area lights
• Ray tracing without sampling artifacts like regular patterns
• New (optional) simplified sampling parameters, primary sampling quality
• Tune all existing rendering modes: ray tracing, rasterizer, progressive, and iray
• Plain number of samples: a value of 100 means 100 samples

mental ray® 3.9 integrates iray® 1.2, a major update of the world's first photorealistic and interactive rendering technology.

• Runs on CUDA GPUs when present
• Supports latest NVIDIA Fermi architecture GPUs
• Photorealistic push-button rendering
• HDR environment maps
• IES profile lights
• Interactive yet final frame renderer

Unified Caching of Illumination Data

• Use open data format for final gather map file storage
• Based on the Map container for better memory handling of very large maps
• Existing final gather maps are fully supported, including fg_copy utility

Native Particles

• Render millions of particles efficiently as spheres or tubes
• Data provided in public Map format, ascii or binary
• New scene element and .mi syntax to embed particles into the scene file
• Example particle rendering shaders included

Ray Tracing Motion Blur

• Dramatically improved motion blur speed and accuracy for ray tracing
• Significantly reduced memory consumption for large numbers of instances

Ray Tracing Hair

• Greatly enhanced hair rendering performance for ray tracing
• Faster hair renderings with IBL (image-based lighting) and ray traced shadows

Cross Platform Automatic Compilation and Deployment:

• LLVM now default on all operating systems: Windows, Linux and MacOSX
• LLVM runtime performance of MetaSL close to native C/C++ shaders

New MetaSL 1.2 language features, including:

• MetaSL techniques, switch shader implementations at runtime
• MetaSL material descriptions

imf_comp

• For simple seamless compositing of rendered images, or image tiles.

dsm_copy

• To inspect and visualize detail shadow map data as 2D images.

imf_copy Update

• To create tiled pre-filtered textures in the OpenEXR format.

Userdata

• A collection of shaders that retrieve custom attributes
• These custom attributes drive material parameter for scene elements