mental ray 3.9 - What's New?

With release of Autodesk 2012 software line ( Autodesk Maya 2012, Autodesk 3ds Max 2012, Autodesk Softimage 2012 ) also become available integrated into them and updated to version 3.9 mental ray renderer. What's new features can offer this new version of well-known mental images product?.. 

mental ray 3.9

• Unified Sampling — new sampling mechanism that unifies different controls over raytracing, rasterizer and progressive rendering engines. At this moment this feature isn't accessible directly ( from UI ) in Autodesk products like Maya 2012, for example, but available in mental ray standalone. Also Unified Sampling can be called via scripts inside of 3d packet. Discussion about Unified Sampling and how to use it in Maya on CGSociety.

• Motion Blur — raytracing acceleration algorithm BSP2 was improved, what led to reduced memory consumption and increased rendering speed in scenes with motion blur. Also rendering quality was enhanced, what will be noticeable at rotating animated objects.

• Hair — rendering speed of hair and fur was increased, along with lowered memory usage.

• Stereoscoping Rendering — mental ray now supports rendering of stereoscopic images. File names of the stereo images can be customized via registry variables.

• iray 1.2 — interactive rendering engine iray was updated. Quality and speed is increased.

• MetaSL 1.2 — in mr 3.9 implemented support for updated Meta Shading Language version 1.2, that can be used for shader writing.

• Native Particle Rendering — mental ray now supports particles rendering.

• Unified Caching — finalgather map caching scheme is changed, what allows to work with larger maps and transfer them into other software.

• New Utilities — supplied with mr 3.9, imf_comp is a small and simple compositing tool that can combine images, rendered with mr. dsm_copy can convert detail shadow map files, created by mental ray, into general image files for display and investigation

• New Shader Package — A new shader package userdata is now part of mental ray. It supports special workflows with large scene, where dynamic attributes attached to scene elements can indirectly drive parameters of the assigned shader(s).

Additional details available on Autodesk website.