The project helped to advance many key visual effects workflows, including automated face tracking and capture, image-based lighting, subsurface scattering, measured BRDFs, hair rendering and multipass rendering in Mental Ray. On its release in 1989 – the same year as the first commercial edition of RenderMan – Mental Ray became one of the entertainment industry’s first publicly available renderers.ĭuring the 1990s, it established itself as a key production tool, both through the studios at which it was used, and through original developer mental images’ partnerships with developers of DCC software.Īutodesk, Alias|Wavefront and Avid were all early adopters, integrating the renderer into 3ds Max, Maya and Softimage respectively, as were pioneering VFX houses like Industrial Light & Magic and ESC Entertainment.īy 2003, when the product’s development team won a Scientific and Technical Academy Award, Mental Ray had been used on both The Matrix trilogy and the Star Wars prequels.ĮSC Entertainment’s digital double of Keanu Reeves from The Matrix sequels. The 1990s: partnering the pioneers of visual effects It was always there for you – until, suddenly, it wasn’t.
If that wasn’t an option, Mental Ray got the job done. Third-party renderers may have had more advanced features – and, as time wore on, more artistic cachet – but they also came at a cost: both financial, and in terms of the set-up time required. If you worked in visual effects or animation, almost no matter which 3D app you used, it came built into your software. Nvidia’s announcement that it is to discontinue Mental Ray marks the end of one of the entertainment industry’s most famous renderers – and arguably, also one of its most underrated.įor a generation of 3D artists, Mental Ray was simply the de facto render engine. With the news that Nvidia is to discontinue the pioneering renderer, we look back over its 30-year history. The ‘Burly Brawl’ from The Matrix Reloaded: one of many key VFX projects on which Mental Ray was used.
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