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View Full Version : The future of Mental ray ?


Saycon2000
11-06-2006, 05:18 PM
hi ! i just want to say that MR 3.5 in Max 9 is very powerfull, faster ( 64 bit ) :) thanks to the Arch&desigh mat and new final gather.....so what is the next step ? what will be in the future version of MR ( 3.6 ) :D .


here is a link http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5816


Quote from 'Rolf Herken' CEO and CTO of mental images:
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For the future we are working towards the ultimate goal of being able to render incredibly complex scenes (with billions of triangles) using raytracing based global illumination algorithms with complex shading including BRDFs, subsurface scattering, and frequency dependent phenomena
*in real-time*.

Our next generation software rendering technology that is built into RealityServer, achieves rendering times of less than 40 milliseconds per frame (i.e., realtime) with full raytracing (and very soon full global illumination) on small 64-bit commodity multiprocessor machines or blades on scenes with tens of millions of polygons.

Parts of this entirely new, revolutionary rendering technology such as our dynamic BSP acceleration methods are being integrated into mental ray, beginning with version 3.5. In mental ray 3.6 we will have support for assemblies, allowing rendering of arbitrarily large scenes, e.g., crowd scenes with a million creatures, even with our raytracing and global illumination algorithms.

Finally, we work on the ultimate solution to the shader creation problem. It is not only the "Holy Grail" of the games industry but also for the VFX/Feature film production - given that the two will converge eventually. In fact, we venture to say that only with our forthcoming mental mill technology and the underlying generalized shading language MetaSL, it will be possible to truly leverage the power of the evolving graphics processor and rendering software technology without being forced to constantly rewrite shader assets for each new hardware rendering platform release, including the variety of games consoles

MetaSL is the universal shading language that we have designed as a superset of all shading languages. It is independent of any target rendering platform, and hence permits the creation of shader assets independent of todays as well as of future hardware and software rendering target-platforms, including GPUs and custom processors as well as software renderers such as mental ray 3.5 with its C++ API.

mental mill is currently in an early Beta phase and will be released this year.

RealityServer 2.0 is in Beta 2 and will be released in the third quarter of this year.

Also, this year we will release mental queue. It will be the most powerful, fully configurable general process management system for production pipelines commercially available. In particular, it will allow you to control any mental ray standalone or batch rendering pipeline with any number of nodes and individual users.
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bravo

Spacelord
11-06-2006, 07:56 PM
I read that interview a while ago, its really good to see what else Mental Images have planned. Considering there website has very limited information.

I'm really enjoying the new Arch&Design shader, the new final gather
settings make it nice and easy.
I recently moved from XSI to 3dsmax9 for the unlimited render nodes
and now all the other cool Mental Ray v3.5 is a huge bonus :)

Schjaack
11-07-2006, 01:35 AM
Does anybody knows when MAX9 will be supported for Vista? Or will it be unsupported untill it's out of Beta-fase?