Mental Images Releases Standalone Shader Tool

Rendering and animation software developer Mental Images has announced the availability of a full-featured stand-alone beta version of its previously released Mental Mill Artist Edition, which is bundled with Nvidia’s FX Composer 2. Mental Mill lets artists develop, test and maintain shaders without previous programming experience, aiming to streamline the process by removing the step of interpreting shaders through 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. According to the company, shaders need only be created once before being exported to Cg FX, HLSL, GLSL or other formats. Mental Mill also features real-time feedback to facilitate graphical debugging and shader optimization, providing a hardware-rendered preview to show nodes at any point in the shader graph. Mental Images CEO and CTO Rolf Herken said, “By putting the creative control in the hands of non-technical individuals, and eliminating the need for hand coding and debugging of multiple source code variants of each shader, mental mill streamlines the entire workflow. The result is a vastly increased productivity and reusability of shader assets throughout the entire content creation process and product lifecycle.”