Alias has announced the shipping mental ray Standalone 3.4 64-bit, the first offering to come from its greater 64-bit plan. Fully compatible with the Maya 6.5 modeling and animation software, the release promises faster processing times and the ability to create and accurately render more complex scenes and images for film, games, broadcast, digital publishing and design visualization.
"This is an important first step in our plans to deliver a new Maya-based product that taps the power of 64-bit hardware," says Kevin Tureski, director of engineering for Maya at Alias. "An alpha version is currently being evaluated at several leading studios."
In addition to the ability to render massive scenes, the 64-bit version of mental ray Standalone offers quality and control, according to Alias. Complete programmability allows users to create custom shaders and produce any desired rendering effect. Furthermore, physically accurate lighting through global illumination means that advanced lighting effects, indirect lighting, light focusing, translucency, glossy reflectors and radiosity can be achieved and combined automatically.
Alias says the mental ray Standalone product and the adapting of Maya software to run optimally in 64-bit mode have been the focus of extensive customer-driven development efforts at Alias in cooperation with industry leaders such as HP, Microsoft, Red Hat, Intel and AMD.
Hardware and operating system combinations supported by 64-bit mental ray Standalone are: Enterprise Linux WS 3 (x86_64) and SUSE 9.1 (x86_64), running on Intel EM64T, AMD Opteron, or AMD Athlon 64 processors. Support for the Windows XP operating platform is expected at a later date. For more information on Alias and its products, go to www.alias.com.
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