Mental images and Nvidia have announced that an updated beta version of mental mill Artist Edition will be bundled with Nvidia's FX Composer 2.5. This combination of technologies, and the new Nvidia Shader Debugger plug-in for FX Composer, facilitates the creation of shaders across popular platforms. The mental mill Artist Edition software is a shader creation tool for all levels of expertise, says a representative. It has an intuitive graphical interface that enables artists, designers, and shader developers to create, test, and maintain shaders with real-time feedback--without the need for programming skills. With mental mill, shaders become platform and environment agnostic, allowing future-proof shaders to be written once and used regardless of emerging technologies.
This latest release of mental mill Artist Edition includes features and enhancements designed to make the graphical interface easier to navigate. In addition to these improvements and preview rendering enhancements, new shaders are included in the tool box. Customer export is a now available with new compiler options that the user can control. This includes shader export for FX Composer.
Together mental mill and FX Composer 2.5 can be used to create shaders for HLSL, COLLADA FX Cg, and CgFX in DirectX and OpenGL. Additionally, developers can use Nvidia's new Shader Debugger, released as a plug-in for FX Composer 2.5, which enables debugging capabilities for CgFX and HLSL shaders, and those exported by mental mill.
A standalone beta version of mental mill with additional features for debugging and shader programming is currently available at www.mentalimages.com.
Nvidia FX Composer 2.5, which includes mental mill Artist Edition, is available for download at: www.fxcomposer.com.