Darkling Simulations Announces DarkTree Support for mental ray

Press Release

Darkling Simulations Announces DarkTree Support for the mental ray renderer by mental images

 

Los Alamos, NM, September 16, 2003 - Software developer Darkling Simulations announces DarkTree support for the mental images® mental ray® renderer with the release of TIWdtemental, a free third-party "plugin" by Dietmar Kopp, The Image Works/63Central of Winnipeg, Canada.

Features

TIWdtemental is a series of mental ray shaders that provide an interface to the procedural texture trees created with DarkTree 2, a sophisticated stand-alone procedural shader authoring tool for computer games, TV and film production. By simply giving a DarkTree texture file as an input parameter to one of the shaders, the texture is rendered without having to generate bitmaps first.

TIWdtemental can be used with any 3D application for Windows that uses mental ray as a rendering engine and allows custom mental ray shaders. It has been tested with mental ray 2.1x, 3.0x, 3.1x under Windows 2000 Pro. It has also been tested within Maya 4.5 and the mental ray for Maya 1.5 plugin.

Building on the work of The Image Works/63 Central, DarkTree XSI takes TIWdtemental and provides a plugin package for Softimage XSI. The add-on packages the SPDLs, HTML help files, and icons, builds a darktree toolbar, and automatically registers the mental ray DarkTree plugin twimental.dll. This XSI package was put together by Felix Gebhardt, an animation student at HFF, the Film and Television Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany. It has been tested with XSI 3.01 and 3.5.

DarkTree

Dietmar Kopp, The Image Works/63Central (the-imageworks.com) of Winnipeg, Canada, developed TIWdtemental using DTE, the DarkTree Engine that was one of several APIs made available with the release of DarkTree 2.5. The DTE is free for both commercial and noncommercial use. Darkling Simulations hopes more studios and developers will follow suit, incorporating DarkTree support into other applications.

DarkTree's versatility lies in its portability across packages. TIWdtemental for mental ray joins the list of Darkling Simulations' own free plugins for Renderman, 3ds max, LightWave 3D, Cinema4D, trueSpace, and Animation:Master.

With TIWdtemental, mental ray users can freely use the hundreds of procedural shaders available from Darkling Simulations' web-based Repository (www.darksim.com). Those wanting more control over the shaders or to create their own will need to purchase DarkTree. Unlike Darkling Simulations' Simbiont plugins, TIWdtemental does not provide an interface to the DarkTree shaders' tweaks or other parameters because the TIWdtemental mental ray shaders are only called at render time. As a result, however, the shaders are extremely fast.

Mental ray users will find DarkTree's visual flow-based editing system familiar in its similarity to mental ray's shader paradigm. DarkTree lets you design interactively by linking together algorithmic components to create photo-realistic 3D procedural materials, surface shaders, animated effects, and image filters.

Pricing and Availability

TIWdtemental and DarkTree XSI are free courtesy of The Image Works/63Central of Winnipeg, Canada and Felix Gebhardt, respectively. They are available for electronic download from www.darksim.com. DarkTree 2.5 has a list price of $419 and can be purchased from select resellers or direct from Darkling Simulations. Version 2.5 is a free upgrade from 2.0. A demo is available from the web site.

About Darkling Simulations

Darkling Simulations, www.darksim.com, is a leading developer of procedural texture creation software. Darkling Simulations is located in Los Alamos, New Mexico.