Thursday, February 14th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

CoreCG releases MentalCore 1.5 for Maya


CoreCG’s MentalCore overview video. The Maya/mental ray toolkit has just been updated to version 1.5.

CoreCG has released an update to MentalCore, its mental ray rendering toolkit for Maya. The plugin is intended to plug holes in Maya’s vanilla shading, lighting and rendering pipeline.

New features in MentalCore 1.5 include a Light Select pass to speed up the creation of per-light passes, a new Diagnostic pass type and updates to the Texture Lookup and wom_archlight Architectural Light shaders.

Users can now generate a single Light Select pass that represents all the possible passes (diffuse, specular and so on) for the lights linked to it, rather than having to generate the individual passes by hand.

Diagnostic passes output sampling information when using unified sampling (Samples, Error, Time).

MentalCore 1.5 is available for Maya 2011 and above on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It costs $199 for a node-locked licence, or $249 for a floating licence, including five render licences.

Read a full list of features for MentalCore 1.5 on the CoreCG forum

Visit the MentalCore website

Image credit: the thumbnail on the homepage is from student short Rollin’ Wild, created using MentalCore.