Nvidia acquires Mental Images (Mental Ray)

All over the net, but no official press release:

http://www.highend3d.com/news/Nvidia-acquires-Mental-Images-Mental-Ray-3-comments-340.html

heh, can't say I'm surprised, Mental Mill the nobe based shader editor is bundled with FX composer 2 which makes for a combination head and shoulders above rendermonkey. Especially when it supports so many formats and even lets you load shaders created in other tools.

So I wondered for some time whether there was something up there. Doesn't Autodesk own Mental Ray though? They sold the licences exclusively for a long time I think.

no evak, besides mental ray is also in XSI (as the only (until recently) and default rendering engine for it)

Mental ray has traditionally been a softimage renderer...its only recently that its expanded to 3dsmax and maya.

its been in 3dsmax for years. Hardly recent?

Mental ray was around before XSI, Used in with softimage way back in 1995 on SGI and windows NT4. Its been out for Max and maya as standard for 3 or 4 years now and as as an addon Before XSI even existed.

I don't use it much as I'm mostly interested in speed and don't do pre rendered stuff. It's got a nice Ambient Occlusion feature thats usefull for ambient occlusion maps in shaders, takes seconds instead of minutes :)

The built in ambient occlusion shader for mental ray isnt that good, it looks nice but its all top down...theres a free addon for it that lets you do directional ambient occlusion that very cool.
I am aware that MR was out well before xsi...which is why i said softimage and not xsi.