-Ptex Support
The Ptex texture mapping system and file format developed by Walt
Disney Animation Studios is now supported for rendering of ccmesh
subdivision surface geometry. The new base shader mib_ptex_lookup is
provided that performs lookup of the texturing information at render
time. Since it is utilizing third-party runtime implementation delivered
with mental ray the shader comes as a separate package
ptex.dll/.so/.dylib.
In order to enable Ptex per-face assignment the ccmesh surfaces need
to carry additional data when computed. This can be enabled globally
using a registry key, or per object with a new optional bary attribute.
-iray 2.0
The iray version 2.0 is a major update of this rendering mode built
into mental ray. It provides numerous improvements in performance and
quality, like native support for BSDF layering in the rendering core.
This version is using the latest release of CUDA, thus it is supporting,
and will actually take benefit from, most recent GPU hardware, like the
NVIDIA Fermi architecture.
-Hair Ray Tracing Performance
Hair rendering with ray tracing uses a new acceleration structure,
which results in significantly better performance and lower memory
consumption. For backwards compatibility, the previous behavior can be
enabled with a string option. The improvement is especially noticeable
when computing shadows and detail shadow maps(10-30%). The image quality
is increased at the same time by raising the intersection precision. In
addition, a transparency depth limit of 250 has been implemented for
hair ray tracing, similar to the the value used in the rasterizer, to
avoid excessive computations for big chunks of hair.
-Detail Shadow Map Features
The quality of detail shadow maps has been improved. The data size of
high-depth detail shadow maps has been reduced. Furthermore, a new
string option allows to optimize size and quality of a detail shadow
map.
-Unified Sampling Features
The support for unified sampling in mental ray and in shaders has been
extended. The min/max sampling limits can now be specified per object.
For convenience, the unified sampling feature can be controlled from the
command line of a standalone mental ray.
-TIFF Image Format Features
The support for TIFF image format has been extended with more features, like
reading LZW compressed images,
reading and writing in tiled format, suitable for texture caching.
The output of tiled images in mental ray can be enforced with a frame
buffer attribute. Using the imf_copy tool, a tiled TIFF file can be
created using the -p option. Note, that the resulting TIFF subformat is
not compatible with mental ray 3.8 and earlier, including its image
tools. Tiled TIFF images may not be supported by external image
manipulation tools.
-OpenEXR Stereo Support
The OpenEXR Multiview extension is now supported and used to create
stereoscopic ("sxr") image files. This allows to store the images for
left and right eye in a single .exr (or .sxr) file. This behavior can be
enabled per frame buffer by specifying a datatype "sxr", or globally by
using a registry setting. Note, that the imf_disp tool is able to
display only mental ray generated multiview OpenEXR files. For other
ones created with external tools, camera names may be interpreted as
conventional layer names.
-Texture Caching Features
This version improves control of texture caching as well as reporting
of cache performance and statistics. mental ray now prints out texture
cache mode and cache size limit in the options info banner before each
frame rendering. For each cached image file, ie. cached texture or frame
buffer, it prints statistics about the number of pixel accesses and
per-thread local cache coherency rate. At end of rendering, mental ray
prints accumulated statistics. The dynamically computed texture cache
memory is based on the size of the uncompressed textures in memory
instead of the file size as used in earlier versions. In particular, the
memory used for rendering no longer depends on the type of texture
compression used.
-Subdivision Mesh Features
The ccmesh subdivision mesh geometry now supports approximation with
the sharp property, to achieve faceted rendering look. In addition,
per-face user data can now be attached to a ccmesh object. Finally, the
previous limit of two texture spaces for ccmesh geometry has been
lifted, and up to four texture spaces are now supported for texture seam
computation.
-Initial Alembic Support
The Alembic open source interchange framework and file format is
supported in an initial form. A new shader abcimport is provided to read
static or animated geometry like polygon or subdivision meshes and
NURBS surfaces from Alembic files, including support for loading them on
demand only during rendering.
-Deprecated Scanline Features
This mental ray version deprecates scanline as its default rendering
mode, but promotes ray tracing as the primary renderer instead. This
allows to take benefit from greatly improved ray tracing speed using
latest achievements in BSP2 acceleration, as well as noticeably reduced
memory consumption especially for larger scenes by avoiding to keep
extra rasterization data. To help transitioning, mental ray adds support
for previous scanline-only functionality in ray tracing mode, like
clip rendering of geometry on camera hither/yon planes, enabled with a string option,
compute motion vectors including camera movement, enabled with a string option.
-New Shader Package
The new shader package useribl comes with mental ray. It supports
convenient workflows for lighting from environment maps or from textured
area lights similar to the built-in IBL functionality, this time
provided as separate shader nodes with extended functionality.
-New Subsurface Shaders
Improved subsurface scattering shaders misss_fast_shader2(_x) have
been added with extended features towards production purposes.
Consequently, two skin phenomena misss_phen_skin2_mia_phen(_d) are
available that are based on these shaders.
:cool: Good work Nvidia !
(posted from
cgsociety)
