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# 6. Upgrading from mental ray 1.9 to 2.x

With mental ray 2.x a new generation of mental ray has become available. Its internal design greatly differs from mental ray 1.9; it incorporates many new features like networking based on a global shared database, incremental changes support, Phenomena, new rendering techniques for caustics and contour rendering, an improved approach to parallelization, and enhanced extensibility. At the same time, obsolete features such as nonrecursive sampling have been removed.

For the mental ray 1.9 user, this means that the transition from mental ray 1.9 to 2.x requires some attention. mental ray 2.x has been designed for maximum compatibility with mental ray 1.9, so in general no additional work will be required by the user to render existing scenes that do not use contour rendering or custom shaders. However, the mental ray installation procedure is slightly different, and shader writers need to make adjustments to the shader sources. This chapter summarizes all changes required when switching from version 1.9 to 2.x.

mental ray 2.x also introduces a number of new features. Some of them improve on 1.9 features and are recommended for future shader designs; these are also listed in this chapter. However, this is not a complete list of improvements in mental ray 2.x.

- 6.1 Rendering Algorithms
- 6.2 Scene Description Language
- 6.3 Shader Writing

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