Aug 14 - mental ray 3.7 Integrates with Autodesk Maya 2009

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mental ray 3.7 Integrates with Autodesk Maya 2009

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LOS ANGELES, CA, Aug 14, 2008 - SIGGRAPH 2008 - mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools today announced that the latest version of their industry-leading rendering software, mental ray 3.7, is now integrated as part of the recently released Autodesk Maya 2009 digital content creation package. The release of Maya 2009 marks the first availability of mental ray 3.7, which will subsequently be integrated by other key mental images customers.

Many of the new features and improvements in Maya 2009 and mental ray 3.7 are intended to provide considerable speed and memory usage performance gains over previous versions. This new release of mental ray for Maya features 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.

Most notable are the significant enhancements to the multi-camera rendering and motion blur capabilities. Maya 2009 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 drastically improve render times for motion blurring scenes while producing a more realistic result.

As an example, it will now be possible to render a single HD image with full motion blur and full displacement maps in less than seven minutes with 10 render passes for a creature type shot. This represents a 3-fold increase in speed.*

“mental images is committed to meeting the needs of visual effects, animation and other DCC professionals with products that make highest-quality rendering, widely and effortlessly accessible at affordable cost to help move the industry forward,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. “Autodesk continues to be a most valuable strategic partner in helping us achieve this mission through the integration of mental ray into their industry-leading software.”

The integration of mental ray 3.7 with Maya 2009 is the latest result of the close collaboration between Autodesk and mental images, two companies that have long shared the goal of providing DCC, CAD and other visualization professionals with the most intuitive, efficient and innovative solutions.

“mental ray has been an integral part of Autodesk Maya since it was included with Maya 4.5, released in 2002,” said Kevin Tureski, Autodesk director of Maya/Toxik product development. “The incredible photo anime style of Speed Racer and the non-photorealistic rendering style of the upcoming Clone Wars are just two of many examples of the creative possibilities with Maya and mental ray. Our customers are constantly finding new ways to push the leading edge of visualization and special effects, and the capabilities of Maya 2009 should provide them the tools with which to keep innovating.”

Maya 2009 Key Features & Enhancements

Fully integrated mental ray 3.7 core: The integration of the mental ray 3.7 core provides the following enhancements:
- Motion-dependent Displacement: It is now possible to control displacement while motion blurring, improving render times for motion blurred scenes, while producing a more realistic result.
- Improved, Adaptive Tessellation for Catmull-Clark Meshes: Catmull-Clark Meshes are now adaptively tessellated at render time. This produces better displacement maps with render time mental ray subdivision surfaces.
Streamlined Multi-Camera Rendering with mental ray: Multi-camera renders in mental ray are optimized though the re-use of pre-computed elements, reducing the penalty for multi-camera rendering and making the production of stereo films more viable.
Native Render Proxy Support: Render Proxies (also known as mental ray assemblies) can now be natively rendered from within mental ray for Maya as well as through mi file rendering with mental ray standalone 3.7, yielding performance gains in multiple ways.
mental ray Volume Rendering Enhancements: A new intersection engine for volume shaders eliminates artifacts where two or more different types of volumes intersect, without the need to use Auto Volume feature that is specific to ray tracing. Volume types such as Fur, Light Fog, Particles and Fluids to be rendered together without artifacts using scanline or rasterizer rendering for improved render speed and memory usage.
High Quality, High Performance Global Illumination: Irradiance particle support and algorithm improvements to enable a higher degree of physically correctness; 'one button click' renderings with select tuning capabilities and automatic adaptivity.
Built-in Ambient Occlusion Support: Built-in ambient occlusion algorithm with caching capabilities provides an alternative to shader solutions for animations.
Fully integrated OpenEXR library: No longer an external component, the OpenEXR library supports “windowing” capabilities of the format used in the renderer, as well as improved multi-channel support.

About mental images

mental images, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images primarily as part of their software products and application services.

mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty.. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies.

For more information, visit www.mentalimages.com.

About Autodesk

Autodesk, Inc. is the world leader in 2D and 3D design software for the manufacturing, building and construction, and media and entertainment markets. Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk has developed the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art digital prototyping solutions to help customers experience their ideas before they are real. Fortune 1000 companies rely on Autodesk for the tools to visualize, simulate and analyze real-world performance early in the design process to save time and money, enhance quality and foster innovation.

For more information about Autodesk, visit www.autodesk.com.

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