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mental ray license bug is fixed on an Intel Core i7 machine

There was a critical license related bug in mental ray 3.7 on Intel Core i7 and the fixed version seems to be distributed now.

http://forum.mentalimages.com/showthread.php?t=5511

The fixed mental ray (SPM) version (might depends on OEM) is the following.

mental ray 3.7: 3.7.1.31 (2009 September 16) or higher
mental ray 3.7+: 3.7.53.6 (2009 October 22) or higher

The detail of this problem is: When you want to run mental ray on Intel Core i7 machine, you will get the following error message:

Sorry, no license available

and can not run mental ray even you have enough licenses left.

It seems recent Intel's CPU becomes complex to count the number of cores. This bug seems related with this.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-64-architecture-processor-topology-enumeration/

Personally, I don't like the license that limits the number of cores. Because the new machines has more cores, but we can not use these cores because of license shortage. If I buy a new machine, I expect that the software runs faster or more comfortable to use. On the other hand, there is no such limitation for GPU that has a lot of cores inside. NVidia/mental image's new renderer 'iray' seems no such limitation for number of cores. I don't know why CPU and GPU have different licensing method. It is just a historical reason, or they are promoting GPU. But, then, Intel or AMD might sue such a license. Fro the users, it is not so great to be suffered by such a strange licensing form.

I believe if you have a problem with mental ray on an Intel Core i7 machine, you could get the updated version when you asked to the support. But, if the support doesn't know this problem, I recommend to refer the above mental images official forum's link and request the fixed version of mental ray.

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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 Ital

A note of mental ray/iray camera terminology.

The original mental ray camera is a pinhole camera. Therefore, some of the terminology differs with a normal camera. I will write them down here. aperture: This is the film width size. This has no relationship with lens aperture/opening. mental ray's camera was a pinhole camera, there is no lens aperture. focal: This is the distance from lens to the film (sensor). Pinhole camera always focused, so there is no focal length meaning. But using parameters aperture and focal length, we can compute the horizontal field of view. I think these two parameters exist for this purpose. aspect ratio: This is film(sensor)'s aspect ratio. There is no relationship with pixel resolution and camera geometry.  aspect ratio = film width/film height. Note: If we use aperture, focal, and aspect ratio, we can compute the vertical field of view. mental ray/iray camera model (pinhole camera) without lens shader Current mental ray/iray can have depth of field effect, etc., this termino