Mental Ray and IRay Available For Maxon Cinema 4D
If you are one of the many people who have been eagerly awaiting the addition of Mental Ray for Cinema 4D, your wait is finally over! Just announced this Wednesday, Cinema 4D users will finally have all the capabilities of Mental Ray in C4D through the addition of a plug-in from at2 called, aptly enough, M4D.
What Is M4D?
The M4D plug-in actually contains two separate render engines: Mental Ray and IRay.
Mental Ray “combines physically correct light simulation with full programmability that allows for the creation of any imaginable visual effect.” Not only that, but you get MetaSL shader language, MIA Materials, motion blur and depth of field, optical illumination and shadow effects with Final Gathering, and more. All the realistic shading and light effects you come to expect from Mental Ray.
IRay is “the world’s first interactive and physically correct, photorealistic rendering solution.” This means, as you move your camera and adjust the attributes of your objects, IRay will update to show you a fully rendered, real-time preview of your scene. A very handy tool to have.
If you’ve never used Mental Ray or IRay with other 3D programs, mainly Autodesk products such as 3DS Max and Maya, they are very detailed render engines that give you more realistic light and shading effects that, honestly, haven’t been matched elsewhere. It’s this reason exactly that Mental Ray has been used in Hollywood feature films including Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, The Day After Tomorrow and Poseidon.
M4D is currently available for Cinema 4D R11 and R12 on both on PC an Mac 32Bit and 64Bit. You can purchase it from the at2 website.
John Kostrzewski is the Editor of Fuel Your Motionography and a freelance motion graphics and visual effects artist, videographer and writer living in Minnesota. He is awesome. Follow him on Twitter at and .
No CommentsNo Reactions