Blental: Blender For MentalRay

Published by Eugene (etr9j) on August 14th, 2006 in Development

While visiting graphicall an interesting build by RCRuiz might have caught your eye. It was simply titled "Blental v0.0.1 (Blender for MentalRay)." Those two sweet words "MentalRay" automatically had me downloading the build and checking it out. Do I hear final gathering?

From the thread:

I'm very Happy to present the first version of Blental. This build is for render to Mental ray that is a one of the best commercial render engines on the market.

Blental v0.0.1

- Lights :
Type lamp, spots, sun and area , this last one with 6 diferent types (Square,Rect,Disc,Sphere,Cylinder,Object) and with the option of a visible light.
Shadow factor.
Phyisical lights options.
Caustic Options for all lights.
GI Options for all ligths.
Sample limits for area lights

-Materials
Supports for Cooktor, Phong, Binn, Dgs, Dialectric with photon flags and new options adjust just for Blental.
Suport for textures type imagen with uvm only.
Transparency, Reflectivity, Refractivity supported.
Bumps supported only for images.

-Objects
A new panel (Alt+M) to edit especific properties for objects.

-General Options
Control for Samples , jitter , contrast , and filters.
Control for Trace.
Control for GI.
Control for Caustic.
Control for Final Gathering.
Control for Motion Blur.
Control for Some Diagnostic.
Control for Render Progress.
Control for not export mesh.

-Camera
Dof support.

You can find render tests that RCRuiz has done with Blental here. And here are the screenshots of the MR interface in Blender:

Rendering:

Lighting (shots of just the area and spot lights which cover the basic options of all the lights):

Object variables (using ALT-M when the object is selected):

I am certain there will be nay-sayers that aren't thrilled with this integration since MR must be purchased and isn't freely available. However, for Blender to have the ability to plugin to production renderers that are widely used can be nothing but a good thing. Well done RCRuiz!

*Note: If you have a standalone MentalRay license, you can get the Windows build on graphicall. The rar has only the blender.exe, and will require the pthreadGC2.dll in the Blender folder which I got here.

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29 Responses to “Blental: Blender For MentalRay”

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1 DT Aug 14th, 2006 at 7:13 pm

Well it's always nice to have many options concerning render engines and rightly said this will probably push blenders reputation in the proffessional area, altough I'm still using as much open source software as possible.
2 Alabandit Aug 14th, 2006 at 8:11 pm

it would be cool to see this incorperated into the main build three, say for blender 2.5 (2.33)
3 Eugene Aug 14th, 2006 at 8:23 pm

@Alabandit
I'm totally with you on this one… I would also love to see POVray integrated in the final release, since the test build for POVray integration has been around for a while.
4 Zsolt Aug 14th, 2006 at 8:30 pm

Yeah! This is a very welcome addition, Mental Ray is very widely used and recognised, and this will only raise Blender's professional reputation and use.
5 ZanQdo Aug 14th, 2006 at 9:05 pm

This is months of hes work, months! and he decided to give it to us for free, isn't he great?

This is so good for Blender :-D
6 Bmud Aug 14th, 2006 at 9:13 pm

Awesome!!! it'd be doubly-great to see MentalRay a little mit integrated in with some of the new features of 2.42 like the preview window. 3dsmax sort of has that where it spits out the final gather first to get an idea of the exposure/composition.
7 aku Aug 14th, 2006 at 9:21 pm

Hey you are doing it again RCRuiz!!!
can't pull any good render from pov yet and you come out with this :)

Felicidades y gracias!!
8 Zxayant Aug 14th, 2006 at 9:25 pm

A small step for men. A giant leap for BLender!

Well Done!!!
9 Sigismondo Pandolfo da Malatesta Condotieri signore da Rimini e Fano Aug 14th, 2006 at 9:36 pm

Step by step geting closer to an excelent.
Im sure this is something that will push blender bit closer to the proffesional use.
I know guys you love pov, Yaf, etc… I love'm too, but there is not nicer taste than a well made mentalrender. it is a masterpiece.
the idea of filling the office of blendermentalrenderers turns me on somehow.
Ill get right into it.

thanks!
10 Kernon Aug 14th, 2006 at 10:54 pm

…great…i just wet myself…gotta go…
11 Joeri Aug 14th, 2006 at 11:56 pm

Now I'm sure going to send something to the suzanna awards.
12 MeiaLua Aug 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am

Bravo, Mental ray produced my first 'wow' moment with raytracing. Since then I discovered Indigo, but i still love MR.
13 Yorik Aug 15th, 2006 at 12:07 am

I think one of these days, the 3dmax, maya, xsi, etc… will need an "export to .blend" option… how delicious!
14 Laughing Cheese Aug 15th, 2006 at 12:17 am

Great…now I just need to be able to afford mental ray, and not a whole app! :D
15 Spike1907 Aug 15th, 2006 at 1:21 am

O M F G
M O G F
F G O M
G F M O

hmm… 3D transformation matrix using "OMFG"??? WTF am I on?!?!
16 Chris Aug 15th, 2006 at 2:20 am

You should all be happy to hear that as a target for the next release the developers are working on an extended and generic render export API which will allow easy integration with most renderers. This effort is being headed in part by ShortWave (Bobby Parker) our resident RenderMan python guru. I'm sure the results will be satisfactory, however long the work takes.
17 Gez Aug 15th, 2006 at 2:21 am

Don't spoil him. He still has a lot of work to do.
Where's that 3D scanner for Blender, Ramón?
XD
18 kijja Aug 15th, 2006 at 3:18 am

Mental Ray is very good,proffesional And thank to RCRuiz.
But I agree with Eugene that I love to see POVray integrated in blender.
I use&learn Blend2pov it work well only problem about lighting gamma but I think
RCRuiz can improve.
19 grafixsuz Aug 15th, 2006 at 3:23 am

Man this is absolutely cool. I went out and bought XSI a few months ago only for the mental ray.
I basically model in blender and use softimage to render. So, I was hoping for some sort of mental ray intergration, RCRuiz you rock. Now I just need a stand alone licence, DOA
20 MagicMyshu Aug 15th, 2006 at 4:58 am

pardon my ignorance, but aren't sunflow renders just as high quality as mental ray. Maybe mental ray is faster and can handle more at once, but just going over the galleries, sunflow looks as least as good — still a very cool thing
21 Sparkus Aug 15th, 2006 at 8:32 am

o_O

OMG! Today… *sniff* … is the most beautiful day in my live!
Ok, that was kinda dramatic, but honestly, I'm so happy to hear that! It's so amazing how professional Blender got. Watching the development of Blender is like watching a young child mature. And I'm already exited about what will be included in the next release (and what will be in 3 years).

Keep on! :D
22 Alpha Aug 15th, 2006 at 1:44 pm

a question… Is mentalray o metalray? in the pictures in some places says mentalray in others says metalray… this is correct ??
23 Eugene Aug 15th, 2006 at 1:52 pm

@grafixsuz
I also have XSI and it's a shame that mentalray is integrated :(. At least XSI has given us the know-how of using mentalray :)

@Alpha
The ones that say metalray are just typos - it's mentalray… damn the elusive letter "n"!
24 RCRuiz Aug 15th, 2006 at 3:02 pm

damn . . . bug 0001 . . . SOME NAMES ARE WRONG!!!!

jejeje to tell the true I did not put a lot of attention to those things . . . I'm sure there is a lot of typos all over the place :S

Thanks for all the commentaries, I realy apreciate that you guys like what I had done :D

Un Saludo
Carlos
25 Tynach Aug 15th, 2006 at 8:53 pm

This is great! I have Maya Unlimited with Mental Ray, and because my laptop isn't connected to the Internet it has an ethernet address of 000000000000, which isn't recognized as a real liscense by Maya… Maybe I can model in Blender and render in Mental Ray! Worth a shot…
26 Paul Aug 15th, 2006 at 9:27 pm

COOL.
First Radial Menus, Now Mental Ray, Fantastic!
27 cekuhnen Aug 19th, 2006 at 1:06 am

OMFG mentalray comes to blender?

that would be so great to get connected to blender. MentalRay is like Pixars Renderman
a serious industry standart! that will only raise Blenders acceptance.

I hope that at one point they will be able to support a similar shader network system in Blender
like Maya has for mental ray.
28 cekuhnen Aug 19th, 2006 at 8:47 pm

MagicMyshu

are you kidding? you cannot seriously ask that. MentalRay is a renderingine used in feature films and it offers today industrial strenght. that is not a toy.

GEZ

do you know anything about a 3d scanner support? that would be fabolous!!!
29 RCRuiz Aug 21st, 2006 at 2:00 pm

cekuhnen . . GEZ is just trying to annoy me jejeje . . . one of the projects that I have put on hold for Blental and Blend2Pov was a 3d Scanner and a 3d moving tracer . . . jejeje

Gez . . . . . de plano eres mi conciencia :P

un Saludo
RCRuiz