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| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | CGI,Computer software |
| Founded | April 1986; 39 years ago (1986-04) inBerlin |
| Headquarters | Berlin ,Germany |
Key people | Rolf Herken (president,CEO, CTO) |
| Products | Mental Ray, RealityServer, mental mill, MetaSL, mental mesh, iray, DiCE |
Number of employees | 80 |
| Parent | Nvidia |
| Website | mentalimages |
Mental Images GmbH (stylized asmental images) was a Germancomputer-generated imagery (CGI) software company based inBerlin, Germany. In 2007,Nvidia acquired the company and rebranded it as the Nvidia Advanced Rendering Center (ARC). The company continues to provide similar products and technology, offeringrendering and3D modeling technology forentertainment,computer-aided design,scientific visualization andarchitecture.
The company was founded in April 1986 in Berlin, Germany, by the physicists and computer scientists Rolf Herken,Hans-Christian Hege, Robert Hödicke and Wolfgang Krüger as well as the economists Günter Ansorge, Frank Schnöckel and Hans Peter Plettner. It was established as a company with limited liability & private limited partnership (GmbH & Co. KG). The Mental Ray software project was initiated in 1986. The first versions of the rendering software were influenced, tested and utilized by the then-sizable commercial computer animation division of Mental Images, which was led by the following visual effects supervisors: The 1991 and 1993 Academy Award winnerJohn Andrew Berton (1986–1989), the 2000 and 2017 Academy Award winnerJohn Nelson (1987–1989), and the 1996 and 2000 Academy Award nomineeStefen Fangmeier (1988–1990).
In 2003, Mental Images completed an investment round led by ViewPoint Ventures and another large international private equity investor.[1] Since December 2007, Mental Images GmbH has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Nvidia Corporation.[2] The company is headquartered inBerlin with subsidiaries inSan Francisco (Mental Images Inc.) andMelbourne (Mental Images Pty. Ltd.) as well as an office inStockholm. Following its acquisition by Nvidia, the company was renamed Nvidia Advanced Rendering Center (Nvidia ARC GmbH).
Mental Images was the developer of therendering softwaremental ray, iray,[3] mental mill, RealityServer, and DiCE. Mental ray is a production-quality render engine that has been used in many feature films, includingHulk,The Matrix Reloaded,The Matrix Revolutions,Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones,The Day After Tomorrow, and much more over three decades.[4][5]
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