It’s no secret that one of the biggest advertised features in 3ds Max 2010 is the new MetaSL implementation, but what does this mean? Well, zap’s mental ray tips talks about it. The image you see above, the left side is the Final Image while the Right side is the run-time Viewport, rendered with the help of MetaSL shaders.
What happens in 3ds Max 2010 is that several of the shaders has been given an implementation in the MetaSL shading language. MetaSL is mental images renderer agnostic shading language. When this shading language is taken through the mental mill compiler, out the other end drops something that can fit multiple different graphics hardware, as well as several different renderers!
via zap’s mental ray tips: 3ds Max 2010, MetaSL and mental mill.
