Rendering made much more robust and reliable

• Improved scalability to available number of CPUs or Cores
• Improved dynamic adjustment to available memory
• Optimized memory handling for more efficient multi-threading
• Enhanced error handling in standard shaders to minimize exceptions

Simplify tuning for rendering quality with Unified Sampling

• No need for individual sampling settings on elements like area lights
• Ray tracing without sampling artifacts like regular patterns
• Simplified sampling parameters, primary sampling quality
• Tune all existing rendering modes: ray tracing, rasterizer, progressive, and iray
• Plain number of samples: a value of 100 means 100 samples
• New: per object overrides for samples settings
• New: command line options for Standalone, render existing scenes with Unified Sampling
• New: integration with multi-pass rendering and non-color frame buffers

mental ray® 3.10 integrates iray® 2, the next major update of the world's first photorealistic and interactive rendering technology.

• Runs on CUDA GPUs when present
• Supports latest NVIDIA Fermi architecture GPUs
• Photorealistic push-button rendering
• HDR environment maps
• IES profile lights
• Interactive yet final frame renderer
• New: powerful and flexible layered BSDF material model
• New: improved convergence quality and speed

Paint textures without thinking of UVs

• Ptex is an emerging industry standard for texture painting
• Use third-party paint tools to create Ptex files for mental ray
• New mental ray texture lookup shader accepts standard Ptex files
• Render Ptex textures pixel-perfect on ccmesh subdivision meshes

Import Alembic geometry efficiently and on-demand during rendering

• Alembic is an emerging standard for storage of assets in film production
• Benefits are much smaller file sizes and very fast read/write operations
• New mental ray shader loads assets in .abc format during rendering
• Supports material inheritance to assign shading properties to Alembic assets

Extended ccmesh geometry features

• Support facetted rendering using "sharp" approximation property
• Allow per-face user data to be assigned to ccmesh geometry
• Lift texture space limit of ccmesh, up to four are now supported

Ray tracing of hair becoming practical

• New superior acceleration method to speed up ray tracing for hair
• Higher performance coupled with reduced memory consumption
• Increased intersection precision for accurate rendering of thin hair
• Improved hair shadow quality and speed also for detail shadow maps

Detail shadow maps adjust to desired quality

• Enhanced quality of default detail shadow maps
• Data/file size of high-detail shadow maps reduced dramatically
• New contrast control allows to optimize for size and quality

Texture caching with more features and better control

• New modes allow selection of the types of textures to be cached
• New options to control texture cache memory usage
• Detailed cache statistics and improved error reporting

OpenEXR "multiview" extensions supported

• Store images for left and right eye in a single OpenEXR file
• Support writing standard OpenEXR stereoscopic files, as .exr or .sxr
• Image viewer imf_disp extended to display stereoscopic OpenEXR files

TIFF format support extended

• Support reading LZW compressed TIFF images
• Read/write of "tiled" image format suitable for texture caching
• Image tools like imf_copy add support for "tiled" TIFF files

Useribl

• Optimized illumination from "light cards", or "textured area lights"
• Shader solution for environment lighting similar to built-in IBL

Subsurface, enhanced

• Easier to control set of subsurface shader and skin phenomenon
• Improved quality with production oriented workflow