mental images Introduces mental mill

A Look-Development Environment for Creating Platform-Independent Shaders in MetaSL™

SAN FRANCISCO & BERLIN - mental images®, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools for animators, visual effects artists and professionals who create high-quality imaging today introduced mental mill. mental mill is available in two editions. The Standard Edition is a complete visual development environment that includes powerful debugging capabilities, shader authoring features, exporters to DCC and CAD software, and instant mental ray® preview rendering; and the Artist Edition, a subset of the mental mill toolset, that come bundled with Autodesk 3ds Max® 2010.


Game Developers Conference
West Hall, Room 2011

With the Artist Edition, one can quickly assemble complex shader graphs from the provided library of shaders, tweak the parameters, and save them as files which 3ds Max reads natively. In 3ds Max one can then assign the shaders to 3D objects, continue to tweak the parameters in context with other shaders and lighting, and fine-tune the look of the final renderings.

For taking shader creation to the next level, mental images releases the mental mill Standard Edition. In addition to the tasks that can be performed in the Artist Edition, with Standard Edition one can write and edit shader code, and visually debug shaders by interactive, visual inspection of graphical representations of the variables while stepping through the code. Also, one can export shaders for use in targeted software applications including Autodesk’s 3ds Max®, Maya®, Softimage®, Dassault Systemes’ CATIA® and NVIDIA’s FX Composer, through the supported, customizable back-end formats such as CgFX, HLSL, and GLSL. With the included mental ray preview plug-in, it is easy to see the rendering results of a shader with mental ray’s photorealistic ray tracer. The Standard Edition will be available for purchase and download from the mental images website www.mentalimages.com in April 2009.

“The mental mill Standard Edition greatly facilitates the creation of complex and visually compelling shaders. In addition, thanks to their representation in MetaSL, these shaders are future-proof and will not need to be recreated or modified to take full advantage of future technology and performance advancements in GPUs, multi-core parallel processing, and rendering algorithms,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and COO of mental images.

“Our publisher signed off on the look of our characters before level design”, said Izmeth Siddeek, Character Art Lead at Blue Castle Games. “mental mill has revolutionized the development pipeline for the making of our latest game, Dead Rising 2. We are looking into integrating mental mill even more.”

During GDC mental images and Blue Castle Games will host a joint session entitled “Platform-independent Shader Development with mental mill: The Making of Dead Rising 2” on Friday, March 27, 2009 from Noon to 1:00 pm, Room 2011 (West Hall). The session will be presented by Izmeth Siddeek of Blue Castle Games and Laura Scholl of mental images.