Programming mental ray®

This book is the definitive reference manual for mental ray version 2.1 and 3.0. It starts with a brief overview of the features of mental ray and continues with the specification of the mental ray scene description language, the mental ray shader interface, and the integration interface for third-party applications. All material is presented in reference form, organized by grammar elements and C function call, rather than by feature set. The book is intended for translator writers, shader writers, and integrators, who are familiar with the C and C++ programming languages. This second, revised edition was extended to cover the new generation of mental ray, version 3.0, throughout the book, and also includes the new mental ray integration manual. The enclosed CD contains a full-featured demo version of the mental ray stand alone and the mental ray library, as well as example shaders with source code and demo scenes, for a variety of computer platforms. TOC:Chapter 1 gives a brief overview of the functionality of mental ray. Chapter 2 describes the scene language in detail. This chapter is organized by language unit. Chapter 3 explains how custom shaders and Phenomena(tm) are written, and documents the shader call interface. Chapter 4 describes the extended geometry shader interface. Chapter 5 describes the integration interface of the library version of mental ray. This chapter is useful only for application developers, and not part of the standard mental ray manual. Chapter 6 contains porting guidelines for users and shader writers upgrading from mental ray 1.9 to mental ray 2.x, from 2.1 to 3.0, and from 3.0 to 3.1. Appendix A describes the command-line interface of mental ray. Appendix B contains the source code of mental ray's scene language parser.