Mental images has announced that its iray rendering technology is integrated into Dassault Systemes CATIA V6, the 3D collaborative design solution. With iray rendering technology leveraging the parallel processing power of NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) certified for CATIA V6, product designers, engineers and marketing professionals can, right within CATIA, interactively create stunningly photorealistic images of their designs in record time.

"As everyone needs to communicate their ideas clearly and most powerfully, high quality photorealistic imaging has become increasingly essential. With V6, a 3D product is experienced as it looks in real life. Product design and innovation professionals have a strong need for intuitive interactive photorealistic visualization to be an integral part of the design process," said Jacques Leveille-Nizerolle, CATIA CEO, Dassault Systemes. "With mental images' iray renderer, CATIA V6 gives casual users, visualization experts, and styling review participants the ability to quickly and easily have a visual lifelike experience of their product as well as to produce physically correct 3D images directly from their working environment, throughout the creation and collaboration phases of their design."

iray rendering technology is available in the CATIA Live Rendering workbench for V6R2011x. It empowers users across multiple industries, including automotive design, industrial engineering, architectural visualization and consumer products design, to create and manipulate seamlessly photorealistic visualization at any moment in the design process without having to wait long for the image to render. High quality product and device styling, design checks and creative marketing materials can be created in a fraction of the time previously required by leveraging the hundreds of parallel processing cores inside the new NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics and Tesla high performance computing (HPC) solutions. Both are NVIDIA CUDA(R) technology enabled and based on the new NVIDIA Fermi architecture.

iray technology provides easy "push button" rendering for designers and engineers so they can focus on their workflow and not on tedious render preparations. With just a few intuitive settings, users can easily create photorealistic images with perfectly simulated real-world lighting and materials, including the subtle effects of indirect illumination and refraction, which are critical to achieving realism.

"The integration of iray into CATIA V6 brings an unprecedented level of performance and realism to the product design world," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. "iray dramatically closes the gap between the conceptual design process and how things actually look in the real world."

CATIA V6 users can harness the interactive photorealistic rendering capabilities of iray technology through the CATIA Live Rendering workbench, which is now part of the CATIA Rendering and CAITA Industrial Design Products.