GDC 2011

Recently we have been at the GDC in San Francisco which has been a really great show. As usual we have been showing off mental mill at the NVidia booth where we were demoing the latest version of mental mill, namely an early version of 1.2.
Unfortunately my pocket camera did not work too well under the lighting conditions on the showfloor, so there are no good images to show, unfortunately. However, I got one shot of David explaining the software to an interested person.

We gave a preview of the new features that have been added to mental mill 1.2 and it was interesting to discuss with the users and hear their feedback. For those who have not been at the GDC, here are some of the highlights that we were showing:

• scene element nodes: In version 1.2 there are new node types that describe a scene that can be previewed inside mental mill. These include the description of geometry, lights and a camera.
• Load any number of preview objects and apply different shaders to them
• View all geometry in one  scene (which is practical if you have a model that is made out of several pieces of geometry that need different shaders)
• Render previews with iray and mental ray directly inside the camera node on the workspace. No need to launch a separate render window.
• Shader creation for iray: iray supports a subset of shaders that you can easily wire up in mental mill and render it with iray inside the camera node
• Project manager: The project manager helps to keep an overview over the shader files and shaders used in your project which helps you to keep an overview over your shader assets.

For our demos we were kindly provided with models by The Game Assembly which has some talented artists that created some cool models. Thanks for their collaboration, I hope to post some images soon.