The software uses acceleration techniques such as scanline for primary visible surface determination and binary space partitioning for secondary rays. The primary feature of Mental Ray is the achievement of high performance through parallelism on both multiprocessor machines and across render farms. Customers will need to purchase additional Arnold licenses if they wish to scale their rendering capability using either background processing, a render farm, or the cloud.An image rendered using Mental Ray which demonstrates global illumination, photon maps, depth of field, ambient occlusion, glossy reflections, soft shadows and bloom However, it can only be used for foreground (in-product) processing. Those who are currently using Mental Ray with older versions of 3ds Max are unaffected by these changes as they have perpetual licenses.ģds Max users will be able to use Arnold out-of-the-box. These changes will affect only users who download and install 3ds Max 2018. If you who wish to use Mental Ray with 3ds Max 2018, you can acquire it directly from NVIDIA that also allows free use of Mental Ray for foreground processing while working within 3ds Max. Arnold plug-in (MAXtoA) will be included with the 3ds Max 2018 software download, and available on the Solid Angle site. Instead the company offers access to the Arnold renderer developed by Solid Angle that was purchased by Autodesk in 2016.

With the release of 3ds Max 2018 scheduled on April 12, 2017, Autodesk will no longer include NVIDIA’s Mental Ray as part of 3ds Max.

Mental ray 3ds max 2018