Massive Software and Mental Images announce Mental Ray Support within Massive

Mental Ray Advanced Raytracing and Rendering Algorithms supported in Massive 3.0

Monday 6 August 2007

Massive Software, the leading developer of AI driven 3D animation systems, and mental images®, the premier rendering software for entertainment, scientific and architectural visualization, today announced native support for mental ray® in Massive. mental ray is software for high–end, photorealistic rendering. Massive is artificial life–based software for producing realistic character animation with up to hundreds of thousands of autonomous performances.

Native support for mental ray within Massive will give customers additional options for rendering Massive scenes and allow them to optimize workflow for applications and pipelines that rely on the quality and realism of mental ray. mental ray support within Massive is available with mental ray 3.6 and coincides with the new Version 3.0 of Massive.

"We are excited to be working with Massive, at a time where demand for its products is on the upswing," said Rolf Herken, the CEO and CTO of mental images. "In mental ray 3.6 we have support for assemblies, allowing arbitrarily large scenes such as those for which Massive is known to be rendered utilizing the most advanced raytracing and global illumination algorithms."

"As Rainmaker expands its capacity, we are looking to integrate Massive as a core capability in our pipeline, providing the creative benefits of Massive to our film and broadcast clients," commented Jason Dowdeswell, Digital Production Supervisor at Rainmaker. "Being a mental ray facility, the Massive/mental integration is a very important step for us."

About mental images

mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing rendering software to the entertainment, computer–aided design, scientific visualization, architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images. The company’s main product is the Academy Award®–winning photorealistic rendering software mental ray® which runs on a wide variety of platforms ranging from networks of workstations to parallel supercomputers, producing images of unsurpassed realism. mental ray was initially released in 1989 and has been used in the production of several hundred major motion pictures. Leading visual effects companies and studios, such as Buf Compagnie, Lucasfilm Animation, Industrial Light & Magic, The Mill, and The Moving Picture Company are among mental images’s largest customers. Additionally, in the CAD field mental ray is used by the world’s leading automobile and aircraft manufactures to accelerate the design of new products.

mental images GmbH is a privately held company based in Berlin, Germany, with a wholly owned subsidiary mental images, Inc. in San Francisco, California and an office in Stockholm, Sweden. For more information, visit www.mentalimages.com.

About Massive Software

Massive Software is the leading creator of artificial intelligence–based 3D animation systems. Massive was founded when Stephen Regelous programmed a unique piece of software for director Peter Jackson to make creation of complicated visual effects scenes involving hundreds of thousands of digital characters a practical reality. Regelous garnered a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Today, Massive Software develops a family of standalone, commercially available products, with customers including The Mill, Animal Logic, Digital Domain, Motion Picture Company, Framestore CFC, Rhythm & Hues and other leading digital production and effects studios. For more information, please contact Massive North America (+1 310 837 7878), New Zealand (+64 9 3030 030), or visit www.massivesoftware.com.