SCIENCE

LOS ANGELES, CA-- Alias/Wavefront(TM), an SGI (NYSE: SGI) company, today announced that it is giving the first ever public showing of its new mental ray(R) for Maya(R) technology at its Siggraph booth, no. 1601 South Hall. The company announced in June that it had entered into a strategic alliance with mental images(R), makers of the world-renowned, mental ray renderer. The two companies are working together to provide an integrated mental ray rendering option for Alias/Wavefront's award-winning 3D animation and effects software, Maya. "mental ray users have been anxiously pushing for Maya integration and we are thrilled to be at Siggraph, publicly debuting it," states Shai Hinitz, Product Manager at Alias/Wavefront. "mental ray for Maya will enable artists to benefit from the seamless workflow between our leading 3D animation package and the world class mental ray renderer." mental ray is a high-performance, rendering software product widely acknowledged as one of the leading photorealistic solutions in the Digital Content Creation and the CAD/CAM markets while Maya is the leading professional 3D graphics, animation and effects software. The new mental ray for Maya technology will allow access to mental ray features such as global illumination. Because the integration of the two products makes use of the existing Maya lighting, texturing and shading workflow, the learning curve for Maya users will be minimal. "We have been using mental ray for quite some time and have had great results," states Stefen Fangmeier, a two time Academy Award nominated visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic. "Likewise, Maya has in recent years become an indispensable part of our production pipeline and the marriage of these two technologies will no doubt greatly enhance our productivity. It is something we're all looking forward to." For more information visit www.aliaswavefront.com