Since 2010 Mental Ray has also included the iray rendering engine, which added GPU acceleration to the product. The idea of a Phenomenon is to package elements and hide complexity. A phenomenon looks like regular shader to the user, and in fact may be a regular shader, but generally it will contain a link to a shader DAG, which may include the introduction or modification of geometry, introduction of lenses, environments, and compile options. Phenomena consist of one or more shader trees ( DAG). Supported geometric primitives include polygons, subdivision surfaces, and trimmed free-form surfaces such as NURBS, Bézier, and Taylor monomial.

This feature can be used to create geometric elements at runtime of the renderer, procedural textures, bump and displacement maps, atmosphere and volume effects, environments, camera lenses, and light sources.Īn image of diamond rendered using Mental Ray in CATIA V5R19 Photo Studio.

Mental Ray is fully programmable and infinitely variable, supporting linked subroutines also called shaders written in C or C++. However assuming these shaders are available to mental ray, any mi file can be rendered, regardless of the software that generated it. Most of these software front-ends provide their own library of custom shaders (described below). Currently there are many programs integrating it such as Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D and Revit, Softimage|XSI, Side Effects Software's Houdini, SolidWorks and Dassault Systèmes' CATIA. mi scene file format for batch-mode rendering. Mental Ray was designed to be integrated into a third-party application using an API or be used as a standalone program using the.

Any combination of diffuse, glossy (soft or scattered), and specular reflection and transmission can be simulated. It also supports caustics and physically correct simulation of global illumination employing photon maps. The software uses acceleration techniques such as scanline for primary visible surface determination and binary space partitioning for secondary rays. The primary feature of Mental Ray is the achievement of high performance through parallelism on both multiprocessor machines and across render farms. An image rendered using Mental Ray which demonstrates global illumination, photon maps, depth of field, ambient occlusion, glossy reflections, soft shadows and bloom

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