Mental Mill Standard Edition version 1.2

[Daniel Brassard]

There is a new Mental Mill Standard Edition version 1.2 announced on the NVidia Advanced Rendering Forum.

http://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread. ... ental+mill

I downloaded the file and installed Mental Mill. Look like you don't need Soft/Max/Maya license to activate it.

Cheers!

Dan

[Rez007]

Nice! Thanks for posting this.

[Matic]

Thanks for the post! I thought MM was dead and gone, much to my distress. I wonder if the increasing adoption of allegorithmics substance designer had anything to do with reviving this?

Speaking of which, SI users should write allegorithmic and request that they include Softimage support to their existing support of Max, Maya etc.

I've found MM to be very useful in conjunction with Softimage, now that we have the metaSL-based HQ viewport it should be even more useful. You can get a lot of very nice graphic/stylized looks with custom shaders in the viewport and customizable shaders for MR is great too. Not having inclination to dedicate the time necessary to become adept at manually writing shader code I am glad MM is still being developed.

[Daniel Brassard]

Hi Matic,

Yes, I am happy about the new version and the way they remove the dependency to the licence.

It was a bummer when MM 1.1 stopped working after my upgrade to Soft 2012. Now I can experiment again..

[Falam]

Graph way to create shaders, nice, too bad there wasn't something like this for Renderman

[Maximus]

so basically this thing lets you create custom shaders to visualize them in soft viewport and thats it?
I always got quite confused on the purpose of this tool.

[Matic]

Mental Mill is a node-based environment for authoring shaders using MetaSL, a generalized shading language, which can then be output in a variety of formats for rendering in mental ray or real time, for maya, Softimage etc. The fact that it outputs analogous real time shaders as well as mental ray allows for viewport approximations of final shading, etc.

As a tool which creates generated code, it's not great for people comfortable authoring shaders directly, but it's a good solution for studios which need some degree of custom shader creation and which don't have personnel skilled in writing shaders in a variety of languages.

Somewhat similarly, Allegorythmics substance designer writes out their own generalized shading definitions which are read by a number of engines - the core idea is a good one, but Mental Mill and MetaSL have struggled. But as a free tool, IMHO Mental Mill is pretty handy to have, for now.

[Maximus]

Thanks, I was just trying to figure out what I could use it for, but It doesnt really fit in my workflow I guess

[Matic]

Messing around with the 1.2 release, it appears only marginally useful - compiling to .fx or .cgfx in "softimage" mode works but results are quite messy.

Interestingly, all of the metaSL nodes mental mill was using seem to have been included in softimage 2013, and can be used in the render tree. In essence, we all have mental mill natively. MetaSL nodes in the rendertree are compiled to mental ray or realtime cgfx shaders for the high quality viewport as needed. For the most part a shader graph built with metaSL nodes in the RT functions the same as a mental mill graph, though you can't export the results as a standalone shader.