Mental Mill

mental mill^® from Mental Images enables artists and other professionals to develop, test and maintain shaders and complex shader graphs for hardware and software rendering through an intuitive graphical user interface with real-time visual feedback - without the need for programming skills. Software companies can incorporate parts or all of mental mill in the form of software libraries into their own digital content creation and design products. Shaders are automatically generated in the MetaSL™ language and can be modified easily. mental images designed MetaSL to encompass the expressive power of all current and future shading languages and shading language standards. Complex cooperating shader graphs can be encapsulated into Phenomena.

mental mill supports CgFX, HLSL, and GLSL, as well as C++ for mental ray and RealityServer. Back-end plug-ins for other targets such as special purpose processors and other software renderers can be developed by third parties using the mental mill API.

For a video demonstration of the workflow, click here.

OpenEXR

OpenEXR is a high dynamic-range (HDR) image file format developed by Industrial Light & Magic for use in computer imaging applications.

OpenEXR is used by ILM on all motion pictures currently in production. The first movies to employ OpenEXR were Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, Men in Black II, Gangs of New York, and Signs. Since then, OpenEXR has become ILM's main image file format.

OpenEXR's features include:

* Higher dynamic range and color precision than existing 8- and 10-bit image file formats.
* Support for 16-bit floating-point, 32-bit floating-point, and 32-bit integer pixels. The 16-bit floating-point format, called "half", is compatible with the half data type in NVIDIA's Cg graphics language and is supported natively on their new GeForce FX and Quadro FX 3D graphics solutions.
* Multiple lossless image compression algorithms. Some of the included codecs can achieve 2:1 lossless compression ratios on images with film grain.
* Extensibility. New compression codecs and image types can easily be added by extending the C++ classes included in the OpenEXR software distribution. New image attributes (strings, vectors, integers, etc.) can be added to OpenEXR image headers without affecting backward compatibility with existing OpenEXR applications.

Meshlab

MeshLab is an open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes.
The system is aimed to help the processing of the typical not-so-small unstructured models arising in 3D scanning, providing a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering and converting this kind of meshes. The MeshLab system started in late 2005 as a part of the FGT course of the Computer Science department of University of Pisa and most of the code (~15k lines) of the first versions was written by a handful of willing students. The following years FGT students have continued to work to this project implementing more and more features.