Month: June 2019

Mental Ray Free Downloads – Links

Steffen, , , 17 Comments

Hi all,

after decades of supporting the rendering community worldwide, the NVIDIA ARC Forum will go out of service, unfortunately, including all of its mental ray sections. That does not mean its vast valuable content is lost, but we will stop hosting it on the original website location.

For those of you who are searching for the download links of the free Mental Ray software, which we did publish in the forum as well, here you are. We include a copy of the text of the original announcement followed by all the links to the pieces of software.

Happy rendering!

The version 1.2 update of the NVIDIA Mental Ray for Maya and NVIDIA Mental Ray for 3ds Max plugins, and the corresponding Mental Ray Standalone distributions are based on the latest major mental ray version 3.14.5.

This software update introduces support for NVIDIA’s Volta GPU generation, and is based on CUDA 9. It will continue to work with the older GPU generations Pascal, Maxwell, and Kepler. The update also fixes a lot of known issues, and improves rendering performance especially for GI Next. Note, the plugin works in Maya 2018.5 dot release too.

Please note, the plugins are free to use for interactive rendering and rendering of still frames from within Maya or 3ds Max. The rendering of animations with Maya Batch, Backburner or Mental Ray Standalone will ask for a license though.

NVIDIA Mental Ray for Maya Plugin

Windows
Linux
macOS

NVIDIA Mental Ray for Maya Standalone

Windows
Linux
macOS

NVIDIA Mental Ray for 3ds Max

Mental Ray Licensing Update

Steffen, 14 Comments

Hi Mental Ray users and lovers,

over the course of the past 12 months, we have converted most of you, the existing and eligible Mental Ray customers, to a perpetual licensing model. That is giving you plenty of time for finishing current Mental Ray projects and for transitioning to alternative renderers in the coming years.

As some of you have noticed, the NVIDIA Licensing Portal was shut down earlier this month. That means, the option to manage your license tokens and generate license files yourself is not available any longer. We are working on a different solution that will allow you to move Mental Ray to another machine easily. We are going to announce any news here, on this blog.

Please do not hesitate to contact arc-licensing(at)nvidia.com in case of licensing issues or requests.

Happy (and uninterrupted) rendering!