Long Awaited Mental Core for Maya Sees Release

Since the Mental Core initial beta announcement back in September 2010, many have been eagerly awaiting the CoreCG plugin for Maya Mental Ray Mental Core and the day has finally come with the release of Mental Core 1.0. MentalCore is a plugin that provides an alternative to the standard rendering workflow for Maya and Mental Ray. Designed and proven in production, MentalCore completes the shading, lighting and rendering pipeline, and is suitable for small to large productions. MentalCore allows you to focus on creating great renders in less time, and the shader library provides a wide range of material, texture and utility shaders to help you achieve the look you need.

MentalCore is a shading and rendering pipeline for Mentalray for Maya. Its a easy to use system, built around a set of custom shaders, with a interface thats tightly intergrated with Maya. Some features include:

• Core Globals: The hub of the Core pipeline, it provides all the settings for output settings, render passes, colour managerment, global occlusion settings, environment lighting, camera and lens settings and more.
• Core Material: A univerial shader thats well suited for animation, thats somewhere between the built-in Maya materials and the Mental Images Architectural shader. It provides a selection of specular types and advanced reflection and refraction controls as well as being energy conserving.
• Core Mia: A wrapped version of Mental Images Architectural shader, combined with the powerful features of the Core Globals and passes.
• Core Paint: A wrapped version of Mental Images Car Paint shader, combined with the powerful features of the Core Globals and passes. (Not available in Beta1)
• Core Hair: A hair and fur shader with full support for all the Core features such as environment lighting and passes. (Not available in Beta1)
• Core Environment: A environment shader with the ability to specify different textures for ray types (Reflection/Refraction, Environment Light etc).
• Core Material Blend: A optimized layered material shader for blending between multiple materials and retaining support for render passes. Perfect for effects such as peeling paint on wood, and reduces the need to create multiple maps for various shader attributes. Supports up to 8 coat materials. (Not available in Beta1)
• Utility Shaders: A collection of other useful shaders such as a texture blend shader, randomizer shader and more.