NVIDIA mental ray for Maya is a plug-in rendering solution, seamlessly integrated into Autodesk Maya®.
The industry standard renderer one has counted upon for years is now available directly from those creating it. Maya artists now receive interactive viewport rendering and easy-to-use global illumination with substantial GPU-acceleration, in addition to all previous functionality and compatibility.
Main features:
- Intuitive global illumination engine (GI-Next) requiring minimal setup or tuning
- 2-4X faster than earlier GI methods of similar quality and up to 10-20x faster with a single GPU
- Ideal for interactive lighting workflows within the Maya viewport
- Fast and easy to use Image Based Lighting and procedural environments like Sun&Sky
- Light Important Sampling enables a large number of lights without sacrificing performance
- Multiple Importance Sampling speeds up physically-based setups with MDL materials
- Much faster rendering of modern lighting setups with area lights and emissive materials
More info: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-mental-ray-products.html