Nvidia acquires RayScale

HotHardware has announced the buyout of RayScale, a start-up launched 10 years ago which has 8 employees and is specialized in interactive ray tracing. This is a term that is often ‘’too’’ easily associated with Intel’s Larrabee.

The Salt Lake City based company currently only offers LightNow for Autodesk Maya still in its beta version. When reading its product sheet, we can quickly see why the company could attract the interest of the firm with the green chameleon:

LightNow provides interactive feedback with physically-based ray tracing, as well as high quality batch rendering.

Version 0.9 Features:

Lambert, Phong, PhongE, Blinn, and Anisotropic materials
Maya lights
Fully responsive ray traced rendering window that updates to changes in the Maya model's geometry or materials
Integration with Maya Rendering window
Simple ray tracing
Global illumination
HDR rendering
Environment mapping

Additional version 1.0 Features:

Caustics
RayScale advanced shaders

In mid-December Nvidia already acquired Mental Ray which develops the 3D rendering engine software used in the movies the Matrix Reloaded, Star Wars : Episode II and Hulk but especially by programs such as Maya, XSI, 3D Studio Max, Houdini and SolidWorks.