iray Renderer by mental images Brings Photorealistic 3D Product Design to Life in Dassault Systèmes CATIA V6

iray photorealism, accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs, becomes part of the design process in CATIA V6.

Berlin - mental images announced today that its iray® rendering technology is integrated into Dassault Systèmes CATIA V6, the 3D collaborative design solution. With iray rendering technology leveraging the parallel processing power of NVIDIA® Quadro® and Tesla™ graphics processing units (GPUs) certified for CATIA V6, product designers, engineers and marketing professionals can, right within CATIA, interactively create stunningly photorealistic images of their designs in record time.

“As everyone needs to communicate their ideas clearly and most powerfully, high quality photorealistic imaging has become increasingly essential. With V6, a 3D product is experienced as it looks in real life. Product design and innovation professionals have a strong need for intuitive interactive photorealistic visualization to be an integral part of the design process,” said Jacques Leveillé-Nizerolle, CATIA CEO, Dassault Systèmes. “With mental images’ iray renderer, CATIA V6 gives casual users, visualization experts, and styling review participants the ability to quickly and easily have a visual lifelike experience of their product as well as to produce physically correct 3D images directly from their working environment, throughout the creation and collaboration phases of their design.”

iray rendering technology is available in the CATIA Live Rendering workbench for V6R2011x. It empowers users across multiple industries, including automotive design, industrial engineering, architectural visualization and consumer products design, to create and manipulate seamlessly photorealistic visualization at any moment in the design process without having to wait long for the image to render. High quality product and device styling, design checks and creative marketing materials can be created in a fraction of the time previously required by leveraging the hundreds of parallel processing cores inside the new NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics and Tesla high performance computing (HPC) solutions. Both are NVIDIA CUDA® technology enabled and based on the new NVIDIA Fermi architecture.

iray technology provides easy “push button” rendering for designers and engineers so they can focus on their workflow and not on tedious render preparations. With just a few intuitive settings, users can easily create photorealistic images with perfectly simulated real-world lighting and materials, including the subtle effects of indirect illumination and refraction, which are critical to achieving realism.

"The integration of iray into CATIA V6 brings an unprecedented level of performance and realism to the product design world,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. “iray dramatically closes the gap between the conceptual design process and how things actually look in the real world.”

CATIA V6 users can harness the interactive photorealistic rendering capabilities of iray technology through the CATIA Live Rendering workbench, which is now part of the CATIA Rendering and CAITA Industrial Design Products.

BUNKSPEED Launches Next-generation Bunkspeed SHOT 3D Rendering Software with mental images iray® Technology

Single NVIDIA Quadro GPU based system delivers 12x speed-up for ray tracing.

CARLSBAD, Calif - Bunkspeed has announced the release of Bunkspeed SHOT™, a completely redesigned “interactive photograph for 3D data” software application
.
Bunkspeed was first to bring interactive ray tracing to the market in 2007 which revolutionized rendering, by empowering anyone to create photographic-quality images, but it was limited to using only the CPU. The new Bunkspeed SHOT™ leverages the power of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) and is built on the massively parallel computing architecture of NVIDIA CUDA™ to dramatically accelerate the user’s workflow. Even the most complex scenes render interactively, and in real-time.

Bunkspeed SHOT™ incorporates mental images’ innovative iray® technology to provide an interactive, 3D rendering solution that brings the power of the GPU to creative professionals everywhere, enabling rapid and fluid feedback. Bunkspeed SHOT™ provides stunning, photorealistic accuracy, and empowers users to intuitively create the highest quality image output without the steep learning curves required of other rendering products.

Bunkspeed SHOT™ with iray® also enables users to scale up rendering over multiple NVIDIA GPUs or machines. An entirely new level of performance and realism is now a reality at less than 20% of the cost for achieving the same level on multiple CPUs.

“As a user of the previous generation software from Bunkspeed, I knew the standard set at the time was tough to beat,” said Peter Crowther, a UK-based, computer graphic artist and illustrator. “Bunkspeed has done it again. Bunkspeed SHOT™ offers breakthrough usability, performance and quality, and is a pleasure to use. I went straight out and bought a ‘Personal Super Computer’ with a Quadro 5800 and three Tesla 2050’s for a total of 1584 CUDA to utilize what SHOT has to offer. The solution has dramatically accelerated my workflow. I am rendering at speeds unimagined just a couple of years ago, and for unbiased interactive rendering it's simply revolutionary. This truly is another revolution in power and performance and has increased my efficiency significantly.”

The re-imagined, all new interface of Bunkspeed SHOT™ further simplifies the rendering process. The workflow and user experience is more intuitive -- packed with more features, interactive lighting, superior shadows, and rendered images that require no quality settings.

Designers, engineers and marketers, and photographers, without expertise in rendering will be impressed with how fast and easy it is to create stunningly realistic images. Architects and interior designers will be equally amazed by how quickly they can render their ideas and designs.

“With the introduction of Bunkspeed SHOT™, the next-generation “3D interactive photograph”, we have eliminated the last of the traditional boundaries associated with 3D rendering by delivering a software solution that allows anyone with creative desire to easily create photo-realistic images from any 3D digital data”, says Philip Lunn, Bunkspeed founder and CEO
.
"With its innovative new SHOT software, Bunkspeed is the first to integrate and bring our interactive iray rendering technology to market,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. “SHOT combines unprecedented ease of use with the most accurate simulation possible. Leveraging the power of the GPU, iray provides creative professionals with the simulated digital camera they could only dream of in the past."

“Only NVIDIA delivers the truly interactive ray tracing experience when running Bunkspeed SHOT™ with iray® technology,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. “Our collaboration with Bunkspeed has resulted in a solution that is designed for the growing community of professional designers and digital artists that demand real-time solutions that easily make their work flow.”

Pricing and Availability
Bunkspeed SHOT™ integrated with iray® rendering technology leverages NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions to enable a combination of unprecedented power, elegance and accuracy. Bunkspeed is raising the bar once again, enabling users to continue to "Render them speechless"™. Bunkspeed SHOT™ is available today starting at $995.

mental images's 3D visualization technologies to be integrated into RTT’s software for product design and marketing professionals

BERLIN and Munich: Realtime Technology AG (RTT), a leader in realtime 3D visualization software and services for product design and marketing, and mental images, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corp. and the global leader in rendering and other component and platform software for visualization and 3D cloud computing, today announced a technology licensing agreement. Under the agreement, RTT will integrate mental images’s iray® and neuray® rendering and other RealityServer® platform component technologies such as the DiCE™ middleware into its software products RTT PowerHouse® and RTT DeltaGen®. RTT may also incorporate mental images technologies in other future software products.

RTT’s products and services are used by many of the world’s leading automotive and aerospace companies, and more recently also white goods, apparel and other consumer brands, to instantly produce photorealistic images and interact with 3D models of products at all stages of their lifecycle, while consumers use RTT’s visual product configurators in the buying process.

Users of RTT’s top-of-the-line 3D visualization tools will benefit from significant enhancements of speed, quality and overall workflow resulting in a major increase in productivity. In addition, new web services will become possible that integrate existing workflows with the power of server-based 3D visualization in the Cloud.

RTT plans to announce the availability of the new product versions at its annual worldwide customer conference which will take place on May 6-7, 2010 in Munich, Germany.

“We are pleased that RTT has selected mental images’s rendering and platform component technologies for integration in their leading software products,” says Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. “Both mental images and RTT are known for their dedication to the advancement of design visualization and 3D content platform solutions. With the integration of mental images’s component and platform technologies, RTT’s products will feature the most sophisticated rendering technology for the fast and accurate visual representation of physical objects and phenomena using the immense processing power of GPUs. This will significantly improve visual quality and performance, resulting in more fluid workflows and faster turnaround times for users.”

“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.”

mental images Products

The following mental images products and technologies are accessible to RTT under the agreement:

RealityServer is the scalable software platform that allows companies to easily develop and deploy multi-user collaborative 3D web application services for visualizing even the largest 3D scenes on secure servers and Cloud computing facilities.

neuray is the RealityServer platform component that contains a variety of rendering technologies, including iray.

iray is an intuitive-to-operate, interactive, consistent, high-performance global illumination rendering technology that generates photorealistic imagery by simulating the physical behavior of light. Unlike other ray-tracing renderers, iray does not depend on complex renderer specific shaders and settings to approximate global illumination. iray achieves its high level of performance by taking full advantage of the CUDA™ architecture programming model, allowing interactive previewing on a single NVIDIA GPU, and scaling well on NVIDIA® multi-GPU platforms.

DiCE is a platform and middleware for the development of parallelized high performance computing applications. It helps software developers to develop applications which efficiently scale to thousands of multi-core CPUs and GPUs, both in single computers and across multiple systems.

mental images and the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) Announce the RealityServer Demo Center

Grand Opening on November 3rd as Part of the Executive Briefing Series Held by NVIDIA and mental images.

SAN FRANCISCO & BERLIN - mental images and the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) at Wichita State University today announce the new RealityServer Development and Demonstration Center. Engineers and manufacturers in the Aerospace and Defense Industries can review, interact with, and design 3D web based applications that enable detailed 3D-imagery of aircraft designs to be rendered using the NVIDIA® RealityServer® rendering platform.

Visitors to the RealityServer Center have the opportunity to experience the most complete, 3-dimensional depictions of an aircraft - from a bird’s eye view of its aerodynamic body, all the way down to the core components of its engine. The NVIDIA RealityServer platform creates real-time images, allowing multiple users to interact with and change, not only the viewpoint, but the content. For engineers in need of comparing design options, the NVIDIA RealityServer platform lets them change parts, resize components, add colors and surface effects, or view exterior and interior configurations utilizing mental images latest interactive photo-realistic ray tracing technology.

“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.”

The RealityServer Center is located in NIAR’s well-established Virtual Reality Center, which provides useful design review services to manufacturers. In addition to demoing NVIDIA RealityServer applications to industry professionals, the 3D CAD Engineering department at NIAR will be able to develop their own RealityServer applications that provide solutions for product design, manufacturing, and product performance.

“RealityServer is designed for knowledge workers who need remote access to large, complicated and highly confidential 3D models for design collaboration, virtual prototyping, product configuration, parts catalogs and high quality imagery for marketing and sales purposes,” said Randy Ochs, vice president, sales and business development, North America, mental images. “We are proud to partner with NIAR and provide a collaboration platform that can play an integral part in helping advance aviation design and the development of 3D web applications for the aviation industry.”

The NVIDIA RealityServer platform at NIAR will run on NVIDIA GPUs that take advantage of NVIDIA’s Cuda™ programming language to provide optimum performance. NVIDIA RealityServer technology utilizes a 3D Web development platform, effectively storing all content to a secure server. This allows any desktop computer or handheld device with a browser to access the material without compromising the speed and quality of the image.

NVIDIA and mental images unveil NVIDIA® RealityServer® platform for cloud computing

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif— NVIDIA and mental images introduced today the NVIDIA® RealityServer® platform for cloud computing, a powerful combination of GPUs and software that streams interactive, photorealistic 3D applications to any web connected PC, laptop, netbook and smart phone.

NVIDIA RealityServer – the culmination of nearly 40 collective years of hardware and software engineering by NVIDIA and mental images – enables developers to create a new generation of consumer and enterprise 3D web applications, all with remarkable levels of photorealism.

* Automobile product engineering teams will be able to securely share and visualize complex 3D models of cars under different lighting and environmental conditions.
* Architects and their clients will be able to review sophisticated architectural models, rendered in different settings, including day or night.
* Online shoppers will be able to interactively design home interiors, rearrange furniture, and view how fabrics will drape, all with perfectly accurate lighting.

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."

RealityServer software utilizes mental images iray® technology, the world’s first physically correct ray-tracing renderer that employs the massively parallel CUDA™ architecture of NVIDIA GPUs to create stunningly accurate photorealistic images by simulating the physics of light in its interaction with matter. Because ray tracing is one of the most demanding computational problems, iray technology is designed to take advantage of the parallel computing power of NVIDIA Tesla.

"Everyone should experience the web the way they experience the world, in 3D," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. "RealityServer offers extraordinary opportunities and far-reaching implications for businesses and consumers, enabling us to interact with 3D content in the form and manner that our brains expect."

Customer Quotes

"NVIDIA RealityServer can revolutionize marketing and sales via the web by enabling the world to interact with virtual products in a more realistic and unconstrained way," said David Kelly, CEO of mydeco.com, a U.K.-based designer furnishing site. "Our interactive 3D planner, which uses RealityServer, is what attracts customers to mydeco, and the immersive, real-life experience it delivers keeps them engaged."

"Some of the biggest problems we face in aviation research involve managing and visualizing massive datasets while keeping that data secure," said Fernando Toledo, Manager, Virtual Reality Center, National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. "Using NVIDIA RealityServer for virtual prototyping, design reviews and remote visualization solves those issues. We are extremely impressed by its performance and ability to realistically render our large 3D CAD models over the web without exposing our IP."

"NVIDIA RealityServer is an integral part of our 3D Scenes application on Facebook," said Mark Zohar, CEO, SceneCaster. "This unique and powerful GPU-based Cloud computing solution offers exciting opportunities for the delivery of realistic 3D applications and services."

Product Information

The NVIDIA RealityServer platform will be available November 30, 2009. Tesla RS configurations start at eight GPUs, and scale to support increasing numbers of simultaneous users.

A developer edition of RealityServer 3.0 software will be downloadable free of charge, including the right to deploy non-commercial applications November 30, 2009.

mental images Unveils RealityServer 2.3 Software with 3D Web Services Support

mental images® has introduced RealityServer 2.3® -- server-based, highly-scalable 3D Web application services software -- which makes it easier for developers to add Web services to existing solutions, based on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).

RealityServer 2.3 software includes a new Web-services framework that enables developers to work with their programming language of choice, using pre-existing development tools and workflows, to build 3D Web services and applications. The framework comes with a comprehensive documentation system, reusable client libraries and example applications for both Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash, which are specifically designed to aid new projects using RealityServer.

“We've built the core of our online 3D service around RealityServer,” said Alain Chesnais, chief technology officer of SceneCaster, a web service that enables users to design and share 3D rooms. “Working closely with the mental images team, we were able to quickly take advantage of several of the new features in RealityServer 2.3. We're thrilled to be using it in our ‘My 3D Scenes’ application on Facebook and Friendster.”

Rolf Herken, chief executive officer and CTO, of mental images, said: “A primary goal of RealityServer 2.3 is to strengthen a company’s existing product development and configuration tools by bridging them with web services. This allows for remote access and collaboration among teams. RealityServer provides the platform to create the virtual collaborative environments required to keep developers ahead of the game.”

Additional RealityServer 2.3 software enhancements include:

* MetaSL 1.0, the universal shader language that is used in mental ray® rendering software,
mental mill® Standard Edition, Autodesk 3d Max 2010, and other offerings
* New Ambient Occlusion and Image Based Lighting techniques for increased realism at faster
speeds (including CUDA™ architecture-based acceleration)
* Faster Progressive Rendering with improved quality
* Newly added support for various 3D file formats, including COLLADA, DWF, OBJ
* Support for automated model simplification and merging
* Improved flexibility for clustering configurations and networking
* Significantly expanded rendering output options
* Automatic Exposure control for High Dynamic Range Renderings
* Rendering textures dynamically within 3D environment

RealityServer software supports the use of multiple NVIDIA® Quadro® graphics cards per server for scalability, highest visual quality and performance of different 3D Web service solutions. These include design review, product configuration and marketing visualization for the aerospace, automotive, architecture, and manufacturing industries as well as social networking and 3D navigation sites.

mental images Adds PTC as the Latest OEM Partner

PTC selects mental ray® 3.7+ for Pro/ENGINEER.

SAN FRANCISCO & BERLIN - mental images® today announced that Parametric Technologies Corporation (PTC) has selected mental images’ mental ray® 3.7+ to bring the highest quality photorealistic rendering features and performance to its integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE solution, Pro/ENGINEER. With the inclusion of mental ray 3.7+ in the Pro/ENGINEER Advanced Rendering Extension (ARX), Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 users can seamlessly utilize its high-end rendering capabilities for product design and development.

“PTC is pleased to partner with mental images to deliver advanced rendering capabilities to support PTC’s customers’ needs. Our customers have requested better rendering capabilities within Pro/ENGINEER and PTC has responded by integrating mental image’s award winning mental ray 3.7+ technology into Pro/ENGINEER ARX," says Michael Campbell, SVP Product Management, PTC.

mental ray 3.7+ is now the backbone of Pro/ENGINEER ARX, allowing users to render a wide variety of real-world materials and environments. It fully leverages mental ray’s capabilities to produce physically accurate and visually compelling results in less time. These include:

* Achieving glossy reflections and optical correct refraction.
o Direct illumination with ray tracing, a key feature in mental ray, makes computing realistic effects for reflections and refractions easy and fast to render.
* Ensuring best performance for established lighting workflows.
o Common light source types can be easily added to your scene. Pro/ENGINEER ARX now provides optimized support for traditional lighting models that are based on idealized light sources, whether it be for distant, point, or spot lights.
* Producing convincing illumination of a scene based on real-world environments.
o High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) can easily be used in Pro/ENGINEER to generate lighting, reflections and backgrounds, producing visually stunning results every time without the need to spend time manipulating light sources.
* Furthering realism with see-through surfaces and soft shadows.
o mental ray generates lighting effects beyond traditional rendering such as patterns or beams of light when casting through transparent objects like glass or water. This indirect illumination is achieved through the photon mapping core technology in mental ray, fully integrated inside Pro/ENGINEER
o The advanced final gathering feature in mental ray generates the subtle but impressive effects like contact soft shadows and color bleeding, providing stronger realism to images than traditional rendering.

“We are very pleased that PTC has selected mental ray for its rendering tool. It’s a natural fit,” says Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images. “The addition of PTC strengthens our robust line up of partners and we look forward to working together to bring the highest-quality rendering to PTC’s products.”

More on mental images

mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images primarily as part of their software products and application services. mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies.

mental ray® 3.7+ gives Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 software users the power to harness superior shader creation

MetaSL™ universal shader language lets visual effects artists create and reuse shaders across all major platforms for multiple projects

SAN FRANCISCO and BERLIN : mental images®, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools for animators, visual effects artists and professionals who create high quality imagery, today announced that mental ray® 3.7+, the photorealistic rendering software that now utilizes MetaSL universal shader language to easily and efficiently create and deploy shaders across platforms, will be integrated into Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 software.

Utilizing the MetaSL universal shader language, mental ray 3.7+ rendering software allows artists to develop shaders that run on all popular software and hardware platforms. In addition, artists do not need to re-architect shaders every time there is an advancement in new generation software, GPU or CPU based rendering systems. MetaSL-based shaders adapt to fit current and future target platforms.

“mental ray has long been known as the industry standard in rendering. The native support of MetaSL in mental ray 3.7+ provides for a better workflow for shader creation and look development in tools such as Autodesk 3ds Max 2010”, said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images. “Autodesk shares our commitment to providing revolutionary design tools for visual effects and design visualization artists and we look forward to further incorporating MetaSL in additional Autodesk products.”

mental ray rendering software is known for a number of enhanced features designed to make it the fastest, most customizable and extensible ray tracing engine yet. In addition to the robust, fully parallelized rendering core for high performance, mental ray comes with a built-in scene database and memory management to handle extremely large amounts of data. Artists can create beautiful, physically correct lighting simulations through a complete set of global illumination algorithms and the software offers optimized support of visual effects including motion blur and displacement. Artists also have virtually unlimited customization options through shaders and plug-ins. mental ray supports all common geometry types and it includes unique sampling techniques to achieve the desired quality of images in less time.

“The anticipated integration of mental ray 3.7+ and the MetaSL shader system into 3ds Max 2010 software will give us a unique advantage”, says Ken Pimentel, director of 3ds Max product management at Autodesk. “For the first time, customers will have a unified hardware/software shading workflow and render-quality viewports. The WYSIWYG viewport experience will enable users to spend more time on iterating creatively and less time waiting for rendering results.”

mental ray rendering software has an installed base of more than ten million worldwide and is used for a wide range of industry applications including the creation of state of the art visual effects for video games, movies, feature animations, visualization of automotive, aerospace virtual modeling needs, and architectural design.

The mental mill® Artist Edition software, made by mental images, will also be bundled with Autodesk 3ds Max 2010. It will provide direct workflow to users by allowing them to natively render MetaSL based shaders in 3ds Max 2010 using its library of existing nodes.

mental ray® 3.7+ Performance Features and Benefits

Native MetaSL Shader Support:
o MetaSL language to be used for CPU and GPU rendering
o Unifies shader languages to simplify and standardize the creation and deployment of shaders within and across various projects

Progressive Rendering:
o Offers early visual results for immediate feedback, at any desired image quality
o Provides a rendering mode suited for interactive ray tracing applications

Image-Based Lighting (IBL):
o Lets artists light a scene efficiently based on acquired environment maps
o The illumination from the IBL is automatically added to all material shaders, which perform regular light sampling.

Performance Optimizations for Large Scenes

Procedural Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) representations and rendering:
o Provides the basis for faster importance-driven illumination algorithms

Hair Approximation:
o The lower number of hair segments result in reduced memory consumption and increase rendering speed.

mental ray® 3.7+ Gives Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 Software Users the Power to Harness Superior Shader Creation

MetaSL™ Universal Shader Language Lets Visual Effects Artists Create and Reuse Shaders Across All Major Platforms for Multiple Projects.

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 imagery, today announced that mental ray® 3.7+, the photorealistic rendering software that now utilizes MetaSL™ universal shader language to easily and efficiently create and deploy shaders across platforms, will be integrated into Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 software.

Utilizing the MetaSL universal shader language, mental ray 3.7+ rendering software allows artists to develop shaders that run on all popular software and hardware platforms. In addition, artists do not need to re-architect shaders every time there is an advancement in new generation software, GPU or CPU based rendering systems. MetaSL-based shaders adapt to fit current and future target platforms.

“mental ray has long been known as the industry standard in rendering. The native support of MetaSL in mental ray 3.7+ provides for a better workflow for shader creation and look development in tools such as Autodesk 3ds Max 2010,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images. “Autodesk shares our commitment to providing revolutionary design tools for visual effects and design visualization artists and we look forward to further incorporating MetaSL in additional Autodesk products.”

mental ray rendering software is known for a number of enhanced features designed to make it the fastest, most customizable and extensible ray tracing engine yet. In addition to the robust, fully parallelized rendering core for high performance, mental ray comes with a built-in scene database and memory management to handle extremely large amounts of data. Artists can create beautiful, physically correct lighting simulations through a complete set of global illumination algorithms and the software offers optimized support of visual effects including motion blur and displacement. Artists also have virtually unlimited customization options through shaders and plug-ins. mental ray supports all common geometry types and it includes unique sampling techniques to achieve the desired quality of images in less time.

“The anticipated integration of mental ray 3.7+ and the MetaSL shader system into 3ds Max 2010 software will give us a unique advantage,” says Ken Pimentel, director of 3ds Max product management at Autodesk. “For the first time, customers will have a unified hardware/software shading workflow and render-quality viewports. The WYSIWYG viewport experience will enable users to spend more time on iterating creatively and less time waiting for rendering results.”

mental ray rendering software has an installed base of more than ten million worldwide and is used for a wide range of industry applications including the creation of state of the art visual effects for video games, movies, feature animations, visualization of automotive, aerospace virtual modeling needs, and architectural design.

The mental mill® Artist Edition software, made by mental images, will also be bundled with Autodesk 3ds Max 2010. It will provide direct workflow to users by allowing them to natively render MetaSL based shaders in 3ds Max 2010 using its library of existing nodes.

mental ray® 3.7+ Performance Features and Benefits

Native MetaSL Shader Support:

MetaSL language to be used for CPU and GPU rendering

Unifies shader languages to simplify and standardize the creation and deployment of shaders within and across various projects

Progressive Rendering:

Offers early visual results for immediate feedback, at any desired image quality

Provides a rendering mode suited for interactive ray tracing applications

Image-Based Lighting (IBL):

Lets artists light a scene efficiently based on acquired environment maps

The illumination from the IBL is automatically added to all material shaders, which perform regular light sampling.

Performance Optimizations for Large Scenes

Procedural Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) representations and rendering:

Provides the basis for faster importance-driven illumination algorithms

Hair Approximation:

The lower number of hair segments result in reduced memory consumption and increase rendering speed.

About mental images: mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images primarily as part of their software products and application services. mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies.

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.

mental images Executive to Speak at 11th Annual Boeing Product Data Exchange Conference

SANTA CLARA, Calif. & BERLIN - Randy Ochs, vice president of business development and sales for mental images, will be discussing the benefits of using 3D Web technologies in the Aerospace & Defense Industry at Boeing's 11th Annual Product Data Exchange Conference in Mesa, Arizona, November 11 -13th, 2008.

Ochs' presentation will demonstrate how integrated 3D visualization technologies and web service platforms can be used to streamline efficiencies in visual computing and data sharing of large assemblies in design, production and e-commerce for the Aerospace & Defense Industries. He will explore new and upcoming 3D Web technologies that allow the integration of existing 3D CAD data and applications to attract, service and retain customers in innovative ways while maintaining intellectual property rights.

Ochs will also address the current market place and its pain points, and will provide real-life examples of how 3D web services platforms can enable new business models for OEM's and their Suppliers.

"3D web technologies can provide immense benefits to manufacturing and engineering industries in terms of accessibility, compatibility, and scalability of large 3D assemblies," says Ochs. "This server-based approach gives engineers in separate geographical locations simultaneous access to the same 3D data, effectively allowing manufacturing plant management, on-the-ground technicians and engineers at multiple locations to view and analyze changes to design plans in real time."

About mental images: mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images primarily as part of their software products and application services. mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty.. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies. For more information, visit www.mentalimages.com.

About NVIDIA: NVIDIA (Nasdaq:NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro® products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to the benefits, features, efficiencies and capabilities of 3D visualization technologies are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended July 27, 2008. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

Trademarks: mental images®, mental ray®, mental mill®, mental matter®, neuray®, iray® and RealityServer® are registered trademarks and mental mesh™, mental queue™, MetaSL™, Phenomena™ are trademarks of mental images GmbH, Berlin, Germany, in the United States and/ or other countries. Other product and company names in this document may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Copyright © 2008 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, Quadro, GeForce, and Tesla are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the United States and other countries with which they are associated.