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MAXON Cinema4D users have a new toy to check out called ‘m4d’, or MentalRay for Cinem4D.  It’s actually both Mental Ray and mental image’s new iray realtime rendering tool, available as a plugin.  Currently in Beta, it’s available for € 980.

Two renderers for one price

By purchasing m4d you’ll get two completely different renderers which are fully implemented:

mental ray and iray.

Thus, you are in posession of the most elaborate render engines, for GPU as well as for CPU based renderings.

m4d | mental ray for cinema 4d.

Graphics cinema4d, iray, maxon, mental images, plugin

On stage at GTC2010, Ken Pimental (Autodesk), Micheal Kaplan (mental images) and Jen-Hsun Huang (NVidia) stood together to announce the next generation rendering technology they’ve integrated.  They showed a simple scene of a few chairs around a table that had been rendering the scene for over an hour, and was approximately 10% in when they were on stage.   Mainly, the delay would due to the fast that the scene has no direct lighting, all lighting was indirect through the set of double-glass windows in the back and then reflected off the various elements in the scene.  They then paused it to show the various Render panels, showing the details of Final Gather and illumination settings, about how they have had to include many options to control the various shortcuts.

The iRay Control Panel.

Starting next week, subscription owners will be able to download iRay, mental image’s real-time GPU-accelerated ray-tracing solution, for use directly within 3dsMax as a new renderer.    The result is a far simpler control panel, far faster renders, and vastly more accurate images at the end.  On the right, you can see the control panel (click for larger-size), and you can see how trivial the new setup is.

After that, they clicked the “Render” button.  It took approximately 10s to translate and pad the scene into the proper formats, then within seconds a near-complete render was visible.  iRay is an interative renderer so the longer you let it go, the better the result will be, however the initial result is usually good-enough (to tell that something is wrong, needs to be corrected, etc) making the iterative process MUCH faster.

The same scene in iRay, 5seconds in.

This will be available to 3dsMax Subscription members next week.

Next, they showed the “cloud rendering” capabilities on stage, run by Peer 1 hosting, showing how the iray rendering (on 32 GPUs) offers interactive real-time rendering.  In addition to simply rendering the image faster, it enables the user to actually “walk” around the scene and see it rendered interactively as they use it. Via a custom web interface, they could then place furniture and art within the room, all rendered realtime.  In addition, since there was no direct lighting they could change the time of day to see completely different lighting environments.

iRay on the Web

The web-interface is all research, and I’ve seen it several times before, but the “official” presentation is new.

Graphics, Science autodesk, feature, gtc, mental images, nvidia

HPC vendor Penguin Computing has just announced that they now will be supported mental image’s RealityServer product in their ‘HPC On Demand’ product, making configuration and deployment of a RealityServer-based product easier than ever.

“RealityServer is a powerful web platform that enables the development of interactive, incredibly photorealistic 3D web applications, which can be compute-intensive,” said Tom Coull, general manager of Software and Services at Penguin Computing. “With POD – which is now optimized specifically for GPU compute workloads – mental images’s RealityServer users have access to a cost-effective, extremely powerful resource on demand, to help them innovate faster and without concern for compute infrastructure limitations.”

Their offering is based on clusters of nodes with NVidia Tesla cards to accelerate the workload, and is exposed via the RealityServer Web Interface.

via Penguin Computing’s “POD” HPC On-Demand Platform Hosts mental images’s RealityServer Platform | www.penguincomputing.com.

Science mental images, penguin

A huge announcement from RTT today, as they state they will begin to integrate mental image’s iray and neuray, along with RealityServer, into their RTT PowerHouse and RTT DeltaGen products.  Already in use by several high-end automotive and aerospace agencies, the inclusion of mental images technology should elevate their visuals to new levels of realism.

“The integration of iray into our products is a logical continuation of our strategy. mental images’s state-of-the-art approach and the alignment of iray with our strategic hardware and middleware platforms fit perfectly with our high quality and performance standards here at RTT,” says Ludwig A. Fuchs, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of RTT AG. “Whether our clients are designing the aerodynamic body of a high-end sports car or promoting a special-edition jogging shoe, they will have the benefit of better image quality and faster workflows. We look forward to harnessing the power of CUDA GPUs for highest-quality results that will be generated faster than ever before.”

No surprise he would mention CUDA, as mental images is owned by NVidia now.  Read the full release after the break.

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Science iray, mental images, realityserver, rtt

Mental Image’s Michael Kaplan has a video online demonstrating what the new iray system, in the latest versions of MentalRay, is capable of.  Complete with some impressive real-time interactive, adaptive refinements, and controllable ray specification, it’s a great feature.

See the video after the break.

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Graphics iray, mental images, mentalray

Pushing the limits of the original date of “Late November”, NVidia & Mental Ray have released the RealityServer3 platform.  The free developer edition and documents are available online, along with some user testimonials:

“RealityServer could revolutionize marketing and sales via the web by enabling the world to interact with virtual products in a more realistic and unconstrained way. Our interactive 3D planner, which uses RealityServer, is what attracts customers to mydeco, and the immersive, real-life experience that RealityServer delivers is what will keep them engaged.”

-David Kelly

CEO of mydeco.com, a U.K.-based designer furnishing site.

No word on pricing unfortunately, but documents get very in-depth on how to use RealityServer with several systems like JavaScript, C++, and more,  including some huge system diagrams like this:

via mental images: RealityServer Platform.

Science mental images, nvidia, realityserver

Robert Oschler of ExtremeTech sat down with some of the higher-ups at NVidia and Mental Images and got the scoop on the previously-announced RealityServer product.  He was privy to a live demonstration (the same office-space used previously) and has some great comments on well it works.

Using shared meeting software to pump images from RealityServer to my screen, I saw in real time how a virtual room that existed only in silicon reacted to different combinations of lighting and materials. (See the video below for a demonstration.) The blinds were closed part way, then all the way. A different view of the room was chosen while the time of day was changed with a few mouse clicks, and then another click added a virtual table complete with chairs. After each change, the view changed in seconds to reflect the new choices and the resulting image looked so realistic, that when they showed me the first image at the start of the interview I told them I thought it was a photograph. Without the help of the remote server running RealityServer, each image would have taken my computer hours if not days to render.

Although, I think his article has a few errors (he says that the RealityServer Servers have a minimum 8 GPU’s per server, where I believe that’s a Maximum), it’s a good insight for anyone interested in the product.

via Ubiquitous 3D: Nvidia’s RealityServer. (Linked to the Print version, all on one page).

Graphics interview, mental images, nvidia, realityserver

If you go near the the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University soon, then you should stop by and check out the new RealityServer demo center.  Visitors get to see the real-time interactive views of an aircraft, changing not only the viewpoint but the design.

“We are excited to partner with mental images to bring RealityServer to our facility,” said Fernando Toledo, manager of NIAR’s Virtual Reality Center. “Utilizing RealityServer’s innovative rendering capabilities will allow us to provide a valuable visualization tool to our clients.”

via Nov 4 – mental images, NIAR Launch RealityServer Demo Center.

Hardware, Science mental images, nvidia

Just received the official statement from NVidia and Mental Images regarding the RealityServer cloud-rendering solution.

The NVIDIA RealityServer platform is comprised of an NVIDIA® Tesla™ RS GPU-based server running RealityServer software from mental images. While photorealistic imagery has traditionally taken hours or days to create, this first-of-its-kind, integrated solution streams images of photorealistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.

“This is one giant leap closer to the goal of real-time photorealistic visual computing for the masses,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president, NVIDIA. “mental images fully embraced the concept of GPU co-processing to enable Interactive photorealism anywhere, any time – something that was science fiction just yesterday.”

Read the full release after the break, and be sure to check out the VizWorld Coverage.

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Graphics, Hardware mental images, nvidia, realityserver

NVidia and Mental Images just announced their newest product offering at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA: RealityServer3 and TeslaRS.

RealityServer is a product of Mental Images, which NVidia acquired back in 2007.  Mental Images is well known for their popular Mental Ray renderer, and RealityServer has been around for a while, with version 2.3 coming out back in July.  What makes RealityServer3 new and exciting is the integration with their recently announced iray real-time raytracing system, and pushes the whole thing across the web to create a web-based interactive ray-tracing solution.  Build yourself a nice cluster with NVidia hardware and RealityServer software, and you can push high-resolution high-quality graphics anywhere in the world with internet access and web browsers.  iPhones, desktops, laptops, even gaming consoles suddenly have access to the type of rendered visuals previously reserved for Hollywood studios.

But what kind of hardware would you deploy this on?  NVidia hopes it will be the TeslaRS.

Read up on the details of RealityServer & the TeslaRS after the break.

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Graphics, Hardware, Science feature, mental images, nvidia, tesla