Softimage and Mental Images Further Strategic Relationship
January 15, 1997
Through a combination of advanced ray-tracing capabilities, procedural shaders, volumetric rendering and a programmable architecture, Mental Ray is quickly establishing a new benchmark for rendering quality. With cross-platform, distributed and parallel processing capabilities, Mental Ray can render in parallel across any number of CPUs in a hybrid network of machines. Mental Ray is also becoming the platform of choice for creating low-cost renderfarms, banks of computers dedicated to rendering. Mental Ray is used across the spectrum from games to very high resolution projects such as Digital Domain's Terminator 2 3-D.
Digital Domain used Mental Ray to produce the stunningly realistic animated character T-Meg for the Terminator 2 3-D attractions at Universal Studios Florida. "Without the ray tracing capabilities offered by Mental Ray, true self-reflections on the T-Meg could not have been achieved," said Daniel Robichaud, digital effects supervisor at Digital Domain. Terminator 2 3-D is one of the highest resolution-per-frame projects - 24K lines of rendering per image - ever produced.