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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).
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The architecture of mental ray

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