Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 Posted by Jim Thacker

Rumours of our death are exaggerated: mental images


mental images staff deny rumours that integration into Nvidia’s ARC team has led to developer layoffs.

Nvidia has absorbed mental images into one of its internal development teams – but claims that rumours of the mental ray developer’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Ten days ago, Nvidia product marketing director Phil Miller blogged that mental images had become part of Nvidia’s ARC (Advanced Rendering Center) team.

The news prompted a number of ‘mental images is dead’ posts on community sites, with several posts linking to Tweets saying: “Rumour has it ~30 people were laid off, management was dispersed.”

Not the end, but the beginning?
Over the past few days, mental images staff have begun to post on the company’s old official forum to deny that the restructure signals the beginning of the end for mental ray development.

Director of training and special projects Barton Gawboy was first into the fray: “There have been staff reductions, but most were due to overlapping disciplines and some priority shifts. At the same time, teams on core technologies like mental ray, iray and cloud rendering have staffed-up by a fair bit. All the development managers are in place, and are now working closely with their peers within NVIDIA.”

On Sunday, mental ray guru Zap Andersson confirmed the increase in development staff, commenting:

“I do not think that categorizing mental ray [as] a “dead end” is fair; on the contrary, beyond the fact that the mental ray team has sized up significantly, there is also lots of cool development in store.”

As yet, there is no word on what those developments will be. More news when we have it.

Read the full thread on the mental images forum