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Autodesk’s new 3dsMax 2011 comes with the newly updated Mental Ray 3.8, but doesn’t expose all of the new features.  In an article for CGSociety, Jamie Cardoso takes a look at it and breaks down what you can and cannot get to from the 3dsMax UI, and some of the details involved.  He gets into such details like:

Although the ctrl_ghost_settings for 3ds Max 2011 come with additional features supported by mental ray such as Final Gather; Image Based Lighting; progressive rendering; Iray; Ambient Occlusion Cache; etc, most of them are still being optimised, fixed and/or not fully integrated. Currently, the features that users may find quite useful for production are the importons and irradiance particles.

via CGSociety – mental ray 3.8 for 3ds Max 2011.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, mentalray, software

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

One of the technologies that NVidia hinted about when we talked to them at SIGGRAPH was something called ‘iray’ (Incremental Ray), a psuedo-real-time ray tracing solution for Mental Ray.  Well today’s the day that becomes official:

“With iray rendering technology, what used to take product designers, visual effects artists and CAD users hours to render can now happen in a matter of minutes without compromising the quality and detail of the image, said Dr. Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research. “The advent of iray is changing the face of this industry by increasing the standards in rendering efficiency as we know it.”

iray will  be included by default with the upcoming mental ray 3.8 for free, but no word on how it will be included (or if it will be included) in the mental ray distributions packaged with popular rendering and animation packages like Maya & 3dsMax.

Read the full release after the break.

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Graphics, Hardware cuda, mental images, mentalray, nvidia

Olivier Charles created a fantastic vision of the Stockholm Public Library, winning a Master Award for Interior Architecture in EXPOSE7.  Over on CGSociety he talks about how he built the scene, including some interesting nuggets of information on working with low memory systems (2Gb) and Mental Ray.

I started from a map. I attempted to make the modeling with a displaced map, but the result was not terribly good. I only have 2Gb of memory at this moment, it’s not enough to subdivide all of the wall.

So on Stephane Brenier’s recommendation, I made a low poly of a sequence of the wall (including the shelf, in multi sub-object), converted it into mrProxy and duplicated it.

It’s really fast, and more than enough for my little computer. Unless you are lucky, there is always a compromise between details and computer’s capacity.

via CGSociety – Stockholm Library Interior.

Graphics example, expose, mentalray

Over at CGArena, Robert Vari has a walkthrough showing a scene he modeled of a “Frog Prince” awaiting his princess.  Built using ZBrush and Maya, and rendered with Mental Ray.

Making of the Prince – CGArena.

Graphics maya, mentalray, zbrush