CoreCG has released an update to MentalCore, its mental ray rendering toolkit for Maya. The plugin is intended to plug holes in Maya’s vanilla shading, lighting and rendering pipeline. This update includes a bunch of new features such as Light Select render passes, diagnostic render passes and a architectural light.
MentalCore 1.5 is available for Maya 2011 and above on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It costs $199 for a node-locked licence, or $249 for a floating licence, including five render licences.
Some of new features:
Light Select Render Pass - Speed up the creation of per light passes using the new “Light
Select” render pass. This allows you to create a single render pass to represent all possible passes for lights linked to the render pass, without the need to create individual diffuse, spec etc passes all linked to the same light(s).
Diagnostic Render Passes - New Diagnostic render passes for outputting sampling information when using unified sampling (Samples, Error & Time).
New Texture Lookup Shader- This is a updated version of the original shader with more options for texture filtering, blurringand the ability to attached different textures for different render stages (finalgather, GI etc).
For more info visit: CoreCG