Mental Images, an NVIDIA company, has introduced iray – a fully GPU accelerated rendering solution for a range of 3D graphics application developers. Iray technology leverages NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver fast photorealism.
Life-like graphics, says the company, can now become interactive as iray rendering technology exploits the massively parallel processing power of the GPU, enabling improved 3D visuals.
Iray technology aims to speed the creative process by enabling designers to accurately simulate their creations using materials and lighting that relate directly to the physical world.
With tight integration with mental ray technology – mental images’ renderer, which is 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 users with the ability to change the way they create synthetic images, according to NVIDIA.
Iray rendering technology is supposed to improve how designers, engineers and other content development professionals work with rendering tools to produce photorealistic imagery. The technology progressively refines an image until maximum detail is reached, providing a single process that smoothly combines interactive pre-visualization and final frame rendering.
The 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, says the company.
Iray will be included with mental ray 3.8 starting in late November 2009 at no extra cost to existing customers and OEMs under maintenance. It 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.
Mental Images, founded in 1986, provides component and platform software for the creation, manipulation, and visualization of 3D content. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corp. with headquarters in Berlin, Germany.
