Skip to main content

About this blog

This blog is about mental ray, a rendering software.

What is mental ray?

Mental ray is a rendering software produced by a German company (a subsidiary company of NVidia. (2009)) mental images, GmbH. Several DCC (Digital Contents Creation) software, e.g., Maya, 3dsMax, Softimage XSI, employ mental ray as one of a renderer. Mental ray is also used in some CAD software, like Solidworks. The famous usage is special effect of some movies, such as StarWars, Matrix II/III, recently one is The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button.

http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-ray.html
http://www.mentalimages.com/gallery/motion-pictures.html

The main sales point of mental ray is a lot of features and you can do a lot of things. But on the other hand, we can do everything means sometimes we can do nothing. It is complex and thus difficult. Especially the customization ability of shaders is flexible, but it is a bit hard for me. However, usually it is suffice to use the provided shaders. One of my Italian friend said, ``mental ray is Ferrari. If you do not know how to drive it, you even can not move. But, if you know that, you can make Matrix.'' As a one user of mental ray, I hope the future direction is simpler.

Many of the mental ray information is in English, I would try to write this in Japanese (see Japanese version pages).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

iray 5: iray in standalone mental ray

So far, I told about exporting an mi file. Now here is the shader conversion for iray. iray supports mia_material. To reuse current scenes, it is nice if I could convert the 3dsmax shaders to mia_material (Arch&Design) shader. I could imagine that some of other shaders will be supported also, but, iray is a CUDA program. CUDA has a divergence problem, it means, if many kind of shaders are in the scene, the performance becomes low. That's natural. A shader is a function and many different shaders are running on a CUDA device, I could see it will be slow. But, if the same function everywhere, then CUDA works well. (in theory. If function itself has a lot of branches, then there is a problem. Though many obstacles are there, but many kind of shaders seems to have not so chance. ) Also I imagine there is less trouble if I use the mental images native supported shaders since iray is a new renderer. In my personal opinion, I would convert the shaders. You can find 3dsmax shaders ...

iray 2: iray in standalone mental ray

Even iray has no customized shaders, iray has a shader. It is mia_material (Arch&Design in 3dsmax) only. Actually, it is a shader that has mia_material interface and the implementation is different from mental ray (only for iray). mental images explains this is for the users who already know the mia_material. Such user doesn't need to learn the iray shader from the scratch. Therefore, some of the physically meaningless parameters of mia_material are disabled. They also said that they will support more physical shaders, like BRDF shaders. Someone  asked about volume shaders support at the confenence, but, unfortunately, iray version 1 doesn't support volume shaders and will be supported in the following versions sometime. As for a DCC software user, the problem of iray is they can use it from 3dsmax/Maya/XSI or not. But NVidia's explanation is 'that is autodesk's decision.' Although, mental ray 3.8+ standalone or NVidia RealityServer support iray. (See ment...