NVIDIA will no longer be selling Mental Ray plugin products in order to focus on bringing AI and further GPU acceleration to graphics by developing SDKs and technologies for software development partners.

Since that time, Mental Ray has remained well-supported in the industry, and in particular, with Autodesk’s super-popular 3ds Max and Maya design suites. That interest in compute was bolstered months later, in December, when the company acquired all of Mental Images. In 2007, NVIDIA’s keen interest in GPU compute became very apparent when it released its CUDA API. In 2003, the release of “Discreet 3dsmax 6” (there is so much history here, it’s crazy) bundled Mental Ray as an alternative renderer, where it remained a constant until the release of the 2017 version.

By the time 1999 rolled around, Mental Ray found support in both Softimage|XSI and 3ds Max – the latter of which was versioned R3 at the time (and then stylized “3D Studio MAX”). Mental Ray’s original developer, Mental Images, was born in 1986, and birthed the software’s first release in 1989.

Mental ray 3ds max 2018