Feature Highlights

Below are some highlights of features in Meridian.

Paint FX and Hair

Meridian for Maya provides seamless export and rendering of Paint FX and Hair. No special setup or configuration is required by the user. Meridian takes care of the details. Anisotropic tube shading is automatically applied to dynamic hair systems, and textures are automatically applied to Paint FX strokes (even the leaf and flower lines). All geometry is rendered as perfectly smooth ribbons or tubes and is not tesselated into polygons at render time. Meridian has the unique ability to analytically render the fine geometry, even if the twist vector is used for fine detail and subtle effects; it is not necessary to force the flatness of the ribbons or tubes to face the camera when rendering. This makes it easy to render lush fur, hair and forests of trees or plants.

Prefiltered and Transparent Shadows

When dealing with scenes that contain transparent objects or lots of fine geometric detail such as grass, hair or fur, standard shadow maps are not always sufficient. To remedy this problem, Meridian renders shadows with the Variance Shadow Map (VSM) method. This allows highly efficient prefiltering of the shadow map data. Unlike typical VSM methods in existing rendering engines, the proprietary and patent-pending method used by Meridian does not suffer from problems of “light leaks.” It also provides full support for transparent and colored shadows, so effects such as light shining through a stained-glass window can be achieved. Since the shadows are prefiltered, self-shadowing of fine geometry such as hair does not require extra resolution in the size of the shadow map.

Displacements

High-quality displacement mapping is often a requirement of content production for film and television. Meridian supports true 32-bit floating-point displacement maps for the best results. Users can easily import high-quality displacement maps from programs like Autodesk Mudbox ® and apply them to the low polygon mesh in Maya. Meridian has the unique ability to render perfect displacements without any approximation parameters or settings. Even extreme displacements are rendered automatically and will never cause cracking, creasing, faceting or any other undesireable artifact. This makes rendering displacements with Meridian very easy, as they will always be rendered perfectly even on the most complex and demanding scenes.

3D Motion Blur

Patented and patent-pending technologies in Meridian provide spectacular 3D motion blur. Most commercial products approximate motion blur with linear segments or simple interpolation formulas, but Meridian is the first to provide truly nonlinear motion blur in 12 degrees of freedom. When used with VSM shadows, motion-blured objects cast motion-blured shadows. Even if the object is transparent, the motion-blured shadows will be transparent. Camera motion can also be included in the motion-blur effect, and the exposure time of the effect can be adjusted.

Instanced Geometry

Meridian distinguishes itself as the demand for scene volume increases. Since the software operates in a small and constant memory footprint, large amounts of geometry pose no problem. Users can instance characters or objects with emitters to create large crowds, herds, flocks or swarms. No special intervention or setup is necessary, and even the most gigantic scenes can be rendered using only a small amount of RAM at render time. This guarantees the most efficient use of system resrouces and will keep your render farm online and productive (no crashes).

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Micropolgons

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Point Sampling