Users of Autodesk Maya have long depended upon the film-quality results from the NVIDIA mental ray renderer. Starting November 30th mental ray for Maya will be available.
Artists can use mental ray within Maya to craft scenes and render individual frames at any resolution, using any supported processor within a machine. NVIDIA mental ray is backwards compatible for scenes from earlier Maya versions. It’s also able to output .mi files to feed production pipelines.
Since February, more than 1,000 beta sites have pounded on mental ray for Maya’s capabilities, like final-frame rendering in the interactive Maya viewport, progressive rendering, MDL material support and new global illumination (GI-Next) that is both faster and far easier to use.
What’s been blowing people away: the GPU acceleration for GI-Next that can slash a one-hour render to a 5-minute coffee break by adding an NVIDIA Quadro P6000 graphics card alongside a 14-core CPU.