The presentation was “Image Rendering Today” by Andy Kopra Senior Software Engineer at Mental Images, Inc.

Andy Kopra started by saying that he has a degree in fine arts, film and photography and is a programmer and special effects artist. His program tonight is about a rendering program called mental ray. Rendering involves simulating the effect of light and the software structure required to accomplish this. He provided concepts and the vocabulary used in describing rendering. He recommended going online to:

www.lamrug.org.

This is the website of the Los Angles mental ray User Group.

Rendering is a description of a scene including object geometries, visual properties of objects, lighting and the atmospheric environment. The effects of light are different from glass, water and clouds. Andy showed several pictures that demonstrated both effects provided by classical artists and those provided by special effects. He said that light is everywhere, but we work with photographs of the world, not the real world. We intuitively observe the complexity of the visible world, but it is not directly renderable. We use cameras, lights and objects to create effects and develop software which is not an intuitive process, but is necessary for rendering. He described how software implements rendering by simulating the effect of light. He described direct and indirect illumination, global illumination and “caustics” such as light reflecting or refracting from glass or water. Rendering uses a scene represented by a database of entities. Objects, lights, and cameras are elements and rendering procedures are shaders. The mental ray software has standard shaders, but providing new effects requires programming. He described the process of writing a shader in C/C++. Rendered images range from realistically adding things to a real background to producing radical forms of animation designed to be spectacular. You also have actors working without a background with the background added to the scene later.

Andy provided a large number of examples and a detailed discussion in a short time period. The illustrations he presented demonstrated the effects of the rendering products that were apparent to even those (such as the writer of this report) that were not familiar with these processes. Remarks and questions from people in the room who were familiar with these processes showed great appreciation for his presentation. You can get detailed information on the mental ray product from other sources, but if you did not attend the meeting you did not get the insights of Andy’s commentary and the ability to observe the visual effects associated with the processes described.

To get details on mental ray and other products of the mental images company go to:

www.mentalimages.com.

There is a great deal of information given on mental ray at this website and I would recommend that anyone who is seriously interested in investigating that software use it as a resource. LA ACM makes no recommendations about the capabilities of specific company’s products, but I will say that the website is well organized, easily readable, and provides references on how to get further information on their products.