Mental Ray

Mental Ray has been used in many feature films, including Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Day After Tomorrow and Poseidon.

[2][3] In November 2017 Nvidia announced that it would no longer offer new Mental Ray subscriptions, although maintenance releases with bug fixes were published throughout 2018 for existing plugin customers.

Mental Ray was designed to be integrated into a third-party application using an API or be used as a standalone program using the .mi scene file format for batch-mode rendering.

There were many programs integrating it such as Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D and Revit, Softimage|XSI, Side Effects Software's Houdini, SolidWorks and Dassault Systèmes' CATIA.

This feature can be used to create geometric elements at runtime of the renderer, procedural textures, bump and displacement maps, atmosphere and volume effects, environments, camera lenses, and light sources.

An image rendered using Mental Ray which demonstrates global illumination , photon maps , depth of field , ambient occlusion , glossy reflections, soft shadows and bloom
An image of diamond rendered using Mental Ray in CATIA V5R19 Photo Studio