Технология Mental Ray основана на принципах физически точного освещения и позволяет вам
 получать большое количество видов: от фотореалистичного до стилизованного изображения. Вы можете
 увеличить мощность интерактивного рендеринга Maya и повысить производительность, установив mental
 ray standalone на дополнительный процессор. Таким образом, вы ускорите взаимодействие стандартного 
и IPR рендеринга и избежите задержек в творческом процессе. Регулировка загрузки поддерживается
 автоматически и позволяет избежать перегрузки сети.
Mental Ray® Standalone software is a high-performance rendering engine for generating photorealistic images. Although mental ray rendering technology is featured in Autodesk® applications such as Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® VIZ, and Autodesk® ImageStudio software, the standalone version is best suited when you have large volumes of data to process. It works independently of your 3D software of choice through a command-line interface. It can also act as the foundation of your distributed rendering solution when used with your Autodesk software. The choice is yours.

Key New Features and Enhancements

The advanced, physically based mental ray® rendering technology allows you to take your CG projects to new, more photorealistic heights. 

The latest release of mental ray® Standalone for Autodesk® Maya® software--mental ray 3.6--delivers improved performance and scalability for rendering large scenes.

Improved Displacement Mapping—Subdivision Surfaces
mental ray 3.6 provides improved rendering for subdivision surfaces with displacement mapping. This means you can achieve a higher level of surface detail with dense displacement maps, while at the same time reducing the memory consumption of the map at render time. 

Support for Hardware Particle Rendering 
Particle types that were previously supported only in the Maya hardware renderer can now be rendered in mental ray. This lets you achieve effects such as motion-blurred hardware particles without the need to combine outputs from multiple renderers. 

Improved Large-Scene Rendering Performance
mental ray 3.6 provides improved support for large-scene rendering through file-based .mi scene segmentation (assemblies). The addition of an adaptive BSP acceleration mode (BSP2) automatically adjusts acceleration structures for mental ray assembly. 

Native Ambient Occlusion
mental ray 3.6 shaders can now use the mental ray core to calculate and cache ambient occlusion—accelerating ambient occlusion computation. 

Motion Blur and Transparency Quality 
New rasterizer options in mental ray 3.6 give you greater control over transparency levels and motion blur quality. 

Native Support for Maya Hair Primitives
The mental ray 3.6 hair primitive allows Maya Hair to be rendered through .mi files—saving precious disk space and time. 

New mia_material_x Shader
A new mia_material_x shader allows you to quickly simulate materials commonly used in architectural and product design renderings. 

Native .dds File Format as Input Texture
mental ray 3.6 for Maya now supports input of .dds texture files, enabling you to render assets from your game pipeline and attain full fidelity in your cinematics.