MentalCore-for-MAya-rendering

CoreCG has released an update to MentalCore, the rendering toolkit for using Mental ray in Maya, adding support for Autodesk Maya 2014 adding some features only available to Maya 2014, catering to the bundled Mental Ray 3.11 of that release, as well as new features and some bug fixes.

MentalCore now supports Maya 2014, along with some new features only available in Maya 2014

MentalCore now supports Maya 2014 Mental Ray 3.11 features such as GPU Ambient Occlusion Mode, and when enabled, the AO can be calculated on the computers GPU, the same time the Beauty Render is going on the CPU, almost producing an Ambient Occlusion Pass for free, not having any impact on the CPU rendering at all.

Another feature for the MentalCore update that is Maya 2014 / mental ray 3.11 specific is the added support for Object Lights. No longer do you have to jump through hoops to create a light from selected geometry, even though this feature is largely experimental at this stage.

MentalCore 1.6v1 adds a new proxy texture workflow with a simple user interface, allowing you to create a lower resolution representation of textures for quicker test renders as well as final gather calculations. Other new additions include and Advanced Options Tab, a new Distance Blend Shader, Render Settings can now be Stored in EXR Metadata and a Global Clamp which can be used to reduce noise effects caused by exponentially bright pixels.

To find out more about the new MentalCore 1.6v1 and its new Maya 2014 features, check out the version history here.