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| mental mill 1.0 Beta Release Now Available for Download mental images announces that mental mill 1.0 Beta is now available for download. This is an advanced full-featured, stand-alone version of the previously released mental mill Artist Edition which is bundled with Nvidia's FX Composer 2. mental mill provides a new approach to shader creation which enables artists of all levels of experience to develop, test and maintain shaders via an intuitive and visual user interface without previous programming experience. This streamlines the workflow and allows users to focus on realizing their conceived images without having to first interpret them to a shader programmer. Additionally, shaders created with mental mill are platform and environment agnostic, so they can be built once to run on any configuration. Shaders need only be created once before being exported to Cg FX, HLSL, GLSL or other formats. mental mill's real-time feedback facilitates graphical debugging and optimization of shaders early in the process. By taking advantage of the dynamic hardware-rendered preview, the resulting nodes can be viewed at any point in the shader graph, making them fully interactive. For advanced shader developers, the graphical debugging interface allows for visualizing the surface normal or color while stepping through every line of code, permitting very rapid shader development. Technical artists can also build Phenomena, complex shader trees created from MetaNodes, as pres-sets that can then be passed on to non-technical artists, ensuring consistency and providing a visual tool for teaching the fundamentals of shader creation. mental mill supports MetaSL, the universal meta shader language developed by mental images. Using MetaSL, shaders are only created once independent of the target platforms and then compiled into highly efficient code for execution on general purpose CPUs as well as on GPUs or custom processors. By using MetaSL, a superset of all shading languages, mental mill makes it possible to repurpose and reuse shaders, and reduces the need to rewrite them for future generations of hardware and software, thus eliminating some of the barriers to asset sharing across mediums. The benefits of this technology reach well beyond the visual effects and entertainment fields. Both the streamlined workflow and visual, interactive editing approach created by mental mill will also benefit a broad range of users such as those in engineering, product design, and marketing. To download mental mill 1.0 Beta visit this page. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Computing News :: home page |