This image of mental ray 3.7 with Maya 2009 highlights its multi-pass/blur capabilities. Courtesy of Autodesk. 

NVIDIA's acquisition of Berlin-based mental images late last year certainly caught the attention of the industry, offering new possibilities for the convergence of GPU and CPU rendering and overall visualization. This was bolstered by NVIDIA's additional acquisition of AGEIA (best known for its gaming physics technology via the PhysX processor).

NVIDIA's venture into middleware enabling obviously caught our attention at VFXWorld, too, and I had a chance to speak earlier this year with Jeff Brown, the company's GM, Professional Solutions Group. Brown divulged that it's part of a larger strategy of increasing value in the middleware layers. "[mental images] recently started taking advantage of the GPU, which is resident in the system to boost performance and also some effects that aren't really possible using an off-line renderer. So the team is putting technology back into this major source and the result is going to be faster, more interactive, higher-quality renderers that may or may not use the GPU. It actually turns out that... it's just a matter of speed."

Fast-forward to last week's SIGGRAPH 2008 in L.A., where mental images had a very large presence and introduced mental ray 3.7, the flagship rendering software that has been integrated into Maya 2009, with significant enhancements to multi-camera rendering, motion blur and advanced render passes. In addition, the 3.6 version is part of Softimage's new XSI 7 with ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) technology for complex deformations and character effects in this node-based workflow.

mental images also unveiled RealityServer 2.2, which will be demo'd at NVISION 08 (NVIDIA's maiden conference on computer graphics) this week in San Jose. This program is the server-based, highly scalable 3D web application and services platform available to developers and system integrators, and was integral to the Rome Reborn exhibit at SIGGRAPH. The new version is geared toward providers of 3D web application services, including Software-as-a-Service solutions.

Earlier, mental images released mental mill Artist Edition bundled with NVIDIA FX Composer 2.5, the shader creation tool that now works in conjunction with NVIDIA's shader development environment and new shadder debugger to streamline content creation.