ENGINEERING

TORONTO, CANADA -- Alias/Wavefront(TM), an SGI (NYSE:SGI ) company, today announced that its recently unveiled mental ray® for Maya® technology will be available as an optional plug-in renderer for Maya before the end of the year. mental ray for Maya, a tightly integrated rendering solution that maximizes the strengths of both award-winning products, is currently in the beta stage of its development. In addition to this new integrated rendering option, Alias/Wavefront will also offer mental ray Stand Alone rendering licenses for increased interactive rendering speed within Maya as well as for use in batch rendering. ``mental ray users have been anxiously awaiting Maya integration and we are pleased to announce that we will soon deliver a solution that thoroughly meets their production needs,'' states Alias/Wavefront General Manager, Bob Bennett. ``mental ray for Maya is not merely a ''tacked on`` translator that forces artists to jump back and forth between applications to achieve their desired look and feel. It is fully-integrated with Maya, allowing artists to remain in the Maya environment at all times so there is no need to re-learn a new texturing, shading, or lighting workflow.'' mental ray for Maya mental ray for Maya is an optional and fully integrated plug-in renderer for Maya that offers all the features and tools available in mental images' renowned mental ray renderer version 3.0. It will be available to customers in either node locked or floating license configurations. ``mental ray for Maya is not a third-party add-on product,'' states Thomas Driemeyer, Director of Engineering at mental images. ``It is an Alias/Wavefront product, thoroughly integrated with Maya and therefore does not require scenes to be exported to a separate standalone renderer -- thus avoiding very expensive double translation and huge intermediate scene files. Being fully integrated, it hooks into various parts of Maya and adds all the necessary buttons, menus, options, etc. to the Maya GUI. Plus, it is also fully integrated with Maya's shader networks by way of mental ray's Phenomenon(TM) Graph Facility. Now mental ray is fully integrated with Maya as an interactive renderer -- with no program boundaries to cross. Maya users can work the way they are accustomed to.''