VFX and animation software makers mental images is introducing mental mill, its new application for developing environments and writing shaders, in two editions for visual effects, animation and image-creation artists.
The standard edition of mental mill features the complete package, including powerful debugging capabilities, exporters to DCC and CAD software and instant mental ray preview rendering. It also features the ability to write and edit shader code, visual debugging of shaders, and visual inspection of graphic representations of variables while stepping through code.
Mental mill also is available in an artist edition that comes bundled with Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 and allows for quick assembly of complex shader graphs from a library, easy tweaking of parameters and saving in 3ds Max-native files.
‘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.
