Mental images, maker of rendering software and other tools for animators, visual effects artists, and professionals who create high-quality imagery and visualizations, announced the availability of mental mill Artist Edition. Mental mill Artist Edition software is a new shader creation tool for all levels of expertise. Using an intuitive graphical interface, mental mill enables artists and other creative team members to develop, test, and maintain shaders with real-time feedback -- without the need for programming skills.
A standalone version of mental mill with additional features for debugging and shader programming will be available from mental images in the fourth quarter of 2007.
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 code for execution on general-purpose CPUs and on GPUs or custom processors.
NVIDIA FX Composer 2, which includes mental mill Artist Edition, is available for download from http://developer.nvidia.com/FXComposer.
Mental images; http://www.mentalimages.com