mental ray 3.7 Available in Autodesk Maya 2009

By DE Editors

Image courtesy of Production Renault Design

mental images (San Francisco, CA) announced at SIGGRAPH 2008 that the latest version of its rendering software, mental ray 3.7, is now integrated as part of the recently announced Autodesk Maya 2009 software digital content creation package (see related DE news coverage, “Autodesk Releases Maya 2009,” (August 2008). This release of Maya 2009 marks the first availability of mental ray 3.7, which will subsequently be integrated by other mental images customers.

This announcement comes on the heels of an earlier announcement made by mental images SIGGRAPH 2008 concerning its unveiling of a new version of its RealityServer, a scalable 3D web application services platform for developers and systems integrators.

The new features and improvements in Maya 2009 and mental ray 3.7 are intended to provide speed and memory usage performance gains over previous versions. This version of mental ray for Maya offers the integration of the mental ray 3.7 core, which will enable fully interactive rendering during scene creation and manipulation. mental ray can render in parallel while manipulating the scene with Maya, enabling users to see the result immediately.

Enhancements have been made to the multi-camera rendering and motion-blur capabilities. Maya 2009’s improved mental ray multi-frame buffer rendering is intended to render multiple images at once, with full motion-dependant displacement mapping,  making it possible to control displacement while motion blurring. As a result,  displacement details are reduced as motion becomes more extreme. This will vastly improve render times for motion-blurring scenes while producing a more realistic result.

For details, contact mental images.

For recent DE coverage, see “mental images Unveils New RealityServer at SIGGRAPH 2008,” (August 2008).

Sources:  Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.