mental ray Progressive Rendering and AO Acceleration

Facilities that have had raylib integrations of mental ray have long had access to developer examples of progressive rendering and new features as they are released. Unfortunately this hasn’t been the case with OEM integrations and most users have had to wait for these updates. In addition to that, Maya doesn’t have all the necessary pieces to make true interactive rendering easy to expose.

The Official mental ray Blog “Inside mental ray” has just posted an example of Ambient Occlusion (AO) rendered progressively using GPU acceleration in mental ray. This is a great example of ongoing improvements and scene examples using the correct API for features like progressive rendering.

This is also a good way to see further development in GPU acceleration and where it would be useful for scene rendering and look development.

The video is embedded below but be sure and visit the mental ray Blog to see a great explanation by Rajko.

mental ray – In The Lab

Xgen Hair in mental ray

Part of building a better user experience for mental ray in Maya is providing information on how to use features in Autodesk Maya 2015 like Xgen hair.

Sandra and Julia at NVIDIA ARC have written a quick tutorial on using Xgen hair with custom shaders and expressions to control hair rendering in mental ray.

Take a look at their post here. There’s also a comments section if you have a question on the tutorial.

Happy rendering!

Expressions in Xgen