Image courtesy of Neil Blevins

With an extensive track record in feature films,
mental ray is widely acknowledged as the most
advanced 3D rendering solution on the market.

Overview:

mental ray®is a professional rendering system that generates images of unsurpassed quality and realism.

mental ray is a leading high-performance, photorealistic ray tracing and scanline rendering package that can be accessed directly from 3ds max. This seamless integration allows experienced 3ds max users to be up and running with practically no learning curve.

With cross-platform rendering, any studio with multiple platforms and processors available can also benefit from mental ray’s high-performance distributed networking to achieve breathtaking results in record time.

At a glance:

• Global Illumination simulates light inter-reflection within a scene
• Caustics render the effects of light cast on an object via reflection or refraction through another object
• Soft ray-traced shadows provide accurate soft shadows generated from area lights
• Vector motion blur creates superior 3D-based motion blurs
• Depth of field simulates a real-world camera lens
• A powerful shading language provides flexible programming tools to create shaders
• High-performance network rendering supports almost any existing hardware

Features:

User interface

• High-performance network rendering supports almost any existing hardware
• Built-in shader mirror standard functions in 3ds max
• Familiar UI minimizes learning curve for experienced users

Indirect illumination

• “global illumination”
• Enhance realism by simulating light inter reflection within a scene
• Calculate light reflected off any diffuse objects onto other objects
• Handle color bleeding effects

Caustics

• Enhance realism by simulating light reflection and refraction
• Create the effects of light cast onto an object via reflection off or refraction through another object
• Achieve challenging effects such as light bending through glass, or light bouncing off a pool of water and against a wall

Soft shadows

• Generate shadows by ray tracing
• Ray-traced shadows normally have sharp edges, but mental ray provides accurate area lights and corresponding shadows with soft edges

Area lights

• Area lights help simulate real world lighting and natural shadows
• Lights larger than a point in space make soft lighting and soft shadows easy to create
• Greatly enhance the natural look of images created with mental ray

Advanced motion blur

• “vector-based motion blur”
• Enhance realism by simulating a real-world camera shutter
• If significant movement occurs while camera shutter is open, images captured on film are blurred
• Motion blur is generated in full 3D using vector information for extremely believable results

Motion-blurred shadows

• mental ray can apply motion blur to shadows of any objects that are motion blurred
• Only possible in systems that can render vector-based motion blur

Depth of field

• Enhance realism by simulating a real-world camera lens
• Generating depth of field in full 3D to eliminate any rendering and aliasing errors for extremely believable results

Robust shader language

• Users can extend mental ray’s functionality using shaders, runtime linked subroutines written in C or C++
• Shaders help create geometric elements, procedural textures, materials, atmosphere and other volume rendering effects, environments, camera lenses, and light sources
• Robust SDK make it possible to represent shaders in 3d studio interface
• Source code examples simplify shader writing

High-performance rendering

• multi-threaded and network rendering
• Link numerous processors together in a single system or across networks
• Individual images are broken down into smaller squares or buckets sent to all available processors, then reassembled on the host computer
• Supports very fast preview rendering of highly complex scenes
• Achieves high-performance speed in final rendering

Multi-platform rendering

• Runs across almost all professional platforms
• Enables studios to use existing Windows NT and non-NT platforms
• Supported platforms include Windows NT, Alpha, Linux-alpha, Linux-x86, SGI, AIX 4, DEC UNIX 4, HP-UX 11, SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris

Incremental scene changes

• Changes to incremental frames are isolated for rendering, as opposed to re-rendering an entire scene
• Dramatically reduces time spent handling data transfers
• Maximizes time spent rendering