Annunciato il motore iray® per Mental Ray 3.8.

Era da un po' di tempo che speravo in questa notizia. Finalmente la Mental Images, l'azienda produttrice di Mental Ray, il motore di render utilizzato da 3ds Max, Maya, AutoCAD e Revit, ha annunciato il rilascio di iray®, un motore di render in grado di sfruttare in modo massiccio l'accelerazione hardware offerta dalle schede video nVidia di ultima generazione.

Per chi non ne fosse al corrente, ricordo che nVidia è proprietaria di Mental Images. Era quindi un passo che tutti aspettavamo quello che finalmente ha unito i due mondi, quello del più grosso produttore di GPU e quello di uno dei migliori motori di render attualmente disponibili sul mercato.

Questa tecnologia dovrebbe portare notevolissimi vantaggi soprattutto in termini di velocità di renderizzazione. La tecnologia iray® verrà integrata all'interno di Mental ray a partire dalla versione 3.8 annunciata per novembre 2009.

Questa è la notizia ufficiale estrapolata dal sito ufficiale di Mental Images:

September 30, 2009
mental images® Unveils iray Rendering Solution

Enables Unbelievably Fast Photorealism for Design Professionals and Engineers Using NVIDIA GPUs

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and BERLIN, Germany — Sept. 30, 2009— mental images®, an NVIDIA company, today introduced iray® – the first fully GPU accelerated, commercially supported, turn-key rendering solution for a wide range of 3D graphics application developers. iray technology leverages NVIDIA® graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver unbelievably fast photorealism to designers, engineers and consumers.

Life-like graphics can now become interactive as iray rendering technology exploits the massively parallel processing power of the GPU, enabling more convincing 3D visuals, greater levels of creativity and faster decision making. “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 technology speeds the creative process by easily enabling designers to accurately simulate their creations using materials and lighting that relate directly to the physical world experienced every day. Because it’s highly scalable, interactive and physically accurate, iray technology allows design and engineering professionals to produce the highest quality final-frame output without the complexity inherent in other solutions.

With tight integration with mental ray® technology – mental images’ renderer, which is extensively used in feature film work and within the leading design and creation tools from Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes and Parametric Technology – iray rendering technology will empower millions of users with the ability to change the way they create synthetic images.
“The combination of iray and NVIDIA GPUs is an astounding achievement, demonstrating our undisputed leadership in computational graphics,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. “The ease-of-use and remarkable speed of iray brings interactive photorealism easily within the reach of any creator or consumer of 3D content.”

iray rendering technology significantly improves how designers, engineers and other content development professionals work with rendering tools to produce high-quality, photorealistic imagery. Harnessing the power of the GPU and the NVIDIA CUDA™ parallel processing architecture, iray technology progressively refines an image until maximum detail is reached, providing a single process that smoothly combines interactive pre-visualization and final frame rendering. iray technology requires only a small number of intuitive settings relating to the physical world that delivers a “push-button” rendering experience for creating final-frame photo-real images.
“It’s no secret that users want to utilize the power of GPUs for photorealistic rendering,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images. “With iray, we deliver a solution that not only leverages the GPU in the most efficient manner but also raises the bar for what is defined as photorealism in rendering.”

Pricing and Availability
iray rendering technology will be included with the mental ray 3.8 rendering software starting in late November 2009 at no extra cost to existing customers and OEMs under maintenance. iray technology will also be available as part of RealityServer® 2.4, the upcoming release of the 3D web application services software. A future iray Integrator Edition will allow independent software vendors to include iray technology within their own products, while future integration with the NVIDIA SceniX™ scene management engine will make iray technology easily accessible to all SceniX-based applications. For more information about iray, please visit www.mentalimages.com/iray.

La pagina ufficiale di iray® è raggiungibile attraverso questo link.

Questo documento PDF invece contiene le domande frequenti relative a iray®.