Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

CoreCG ships MentalCore rendering plugin for Maya

CoreCG has unveiled MentalCore, its production-level rendering plugin for Maya.

Intended as an alternative to standard workflow in Maya and mental ray, CoreCG streamlines the Maya shading, lighting and rendering pipeline: development informed by production at New Zealand’s Oktobor Animation, where CoreCG developer Corey Frew works as a pipeline TD.

Features include a completely new node-based render pass system, including a viewport preview option; exposure of a number of hidden mental ray features via Render Globals; a complete colour-management system and shader library; and a number of built-in camera features.

The plugin comes with a simple Python API to facilitate pipeline integration.

CoreCG is offering special pricing of $189 for a node-locked licence or $199 for a floating licence, the latter including five free render nodes, to anyone who signs up before the official public release on 15 January 2012 and purchases before 30 June 2012.

MentalCore supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and is compatible with Maya 2011 and above.

Updated 12 December: The original post spelled Corey’s surname ‘Drew’ rather than ‘Frew’. Apologies, Corey.

Updated 25 January 2012: MentalCore has now been officially released, and received its first update. Version 1.1 adds “support for mental ray standalone and a way to attach MentalCore shaders to Maya Hair”.

Read a full feature list for MentalCore
(Includes download link for trial version)

Visit the CoreCG website