NVIDIA GPU Conference: 3ds Max Adds iRay Rendering Support

The 2010 NVIDIA GTC conference kicked off yesterday in San Jose and in its second year is more than double in size from last year. What’s the conference all about and why do we care? Consider it something of a SIGGRAPH-style gathering, but focusing on GPU technology. The speed curve in GPU technology is quickly outpacing that of CPUs, and its massive parallel processing and lower power consumption is finding adoption in areas of the visual effects and post business. This year’s CS5 Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine , The Foundry’s Blink Technology, and ILM’s fire simulations are all examples of this technology touching our industry. If you look at the conference as a whole, it’s clear that GPU tech — and NVIDIA’s CUDA specifically — is hitting critical mass.

At the opening keynote, Autodesk announced that 3ds Max will include Mental Images iRay support, added in a maintenance release which will be available to subscription holders on September 29th. While not designed for rendering sequences, direct iRay support does give the ability to get speedy ray-traced stills utilizing CUDA technology on supported graphics card. Mental Images’ Michael Kaplan presented a session at GTC on Tuesday which covered a bit of background about iRay as well as the new support in 3ds. Click through for the press release and more details about the 3ds support.

Before the press release, some key details from Michael Kaplan about iRay in 3ds Max:

Materials: Supports standard advanced rendering materials in 3ds Max. No special or vendor specific materials required

• Arch and Design Materials
• Pro Materials (Autodesk Materials, v1 and v2)
• mia_materials
• Subset of standard materials

Lights: Supports standard advanced rendering lights in 3ds Max

• Photometric lights
• IES profile lights
• Area lights
• Point lights, spot lights, directional lights
• HDR environment maps, domes
• Max Sun&Sky model
• Emissive surfaces (additional color)

Map Support

• Bump maps
• Diffuse, specular, transparency, refraction, reflection, anistotropy, etc.
• Map blends
• 2D noise, 3D noise

Geometry: all 3ds Max geometry, including displacement geometry

Cameras: Full 3ds Max camera support

• mia_lens_shader
• Depth of field supported without performance penalty

And the press release from NVIDIA:

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GPU Technology Conference 2010 (GTC), SAN JOSE, Calif. – Sept. 21, 2010 -NVIDIA and Autodesk are jointly demonstrating powerful new capabilities based upon NVIDIA technology, expected to come to Autodesk(r) 3ds Max(r) software Subscription members as part of the 3ds Max 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack this fall. NVIDIA and Autodesk have worked to revolutionize photorealistic rendering and physics simulation with the integration ofthe new GPU-accelerated iray(r) renderer from mental images>(r) and a new rigid bodyphysics workflow powered by NVIDIA(r) PhysX(tm) technology into both Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk(r) 3ds Max(r) Design 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack software.

The new iray renderer within 3ds Max provides creative visualization artists with a more intuitive means for creating images that rival photographs, in a fraction of the time needed with traditional workflows. 3D artists can now use materials and lights which correspond and react more like those in the physical world to more quickly bring their 3ds Max worlds to life, rather than juggling a multitude of computer graphics controls to merely approximate it. The iray workflow is enhanced with considerable acceleration from NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) based on the NVIDIA CUDA(tm) architecture. While iray produces identical images on either CPUs or GPUs, 3ds Max users will enjoy up to 6X faster results over dual quad-core CPUs when using a GPU such as the new NVIDIA Quadro(r) 5000 or Tesla(tm) C2050. Designers looking for the fastest iray results can further boost their speed by adding additional NVIDIA GPUs to their system.

NVIDIA PhysX technology fuels a new rigid body dynamics feature set for 3ds Max, allowing animators to control their simulations directly within the 3ds Max viewport. The PhysX feature supports static, dynamic, and kinematic rigid bodies and an array of constraints in a more efficient workflow that has been production proven by numerous game developers over the past several years. Realistic results are more quickly achieved by choosing from preset real-world materials having physical properties, and then tweaking parameters as required. The resulting simulations are immediatelyusable by effects artists and have a seamless data path to the PhysX engine employed by top tier game developers such as Sumea and Obsidion.

“We continually aim to provide superior workflows and cutting-edge capabilities within 3ds Max, and the rendering and physics solutions powered byNVIDIA technologies excel at continuing that 20 year tradition,” said Ken Pimentel, director of Visual Communication Solutions at Autodesk. “This update is a terrific leap forward for our 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design Subscription members, who will have physics directly in their viewports with PhysX and can soon enter this next stage of the rendering revolution with iray’s GPU accelerated rendering.”
To learn more, visit: www.nvidia.com/quadro