mental mill 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™.
MetaSL shaders and Phenomena are valuable and future-proof assets. They do not need to be re-authored for different target platforms. The built-in proprietary mental mill compiler technology generates abstract syntax tree representations of shaders and Phenomena. These are then translated by back-end plug-in modules into various dedicated or general purpose target languages for compilation to one or more target platforms with the respective native compilers, including CPUs (C++), GPUs (Cg, GLSL, HLSL) and other current and future platforms, eliminating the need to re-engineer and debug shaders and Phenomena for each of them. Whenever possible, mental mill produces real-time interactive visual feedback using real-time compilation of the resulting code and its immediate execution on the target platform.
mental mill ships with support for Cg, 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.

What is mental mill?
mental mill™ is an innovative new approach to shader creation which allows users to concentrate their efforts on realizing imagined images. It supports:
- Creation of shaders without programming
- Graphical shader debugging and optimization
- Repurposing and reuse of shaders
mental mill is a component software or application that is made to integrate or work with 3D software. At its core is the MetaSL® shader language – a simple yet, expressive language that is a superset of all shader languages. This enables shader creation via a graphical user interface with real-time feedback, and creates shaders, Metanodes™, and Phenomena™ that are platform/environment agnostic and are future-proof.
Artists and programmers who write shaders for video games, visual effects, feature animation, design visualization, etc., face many more challenges than the creative aspects of producing them. Shading languages tend to be technical, and the resulting shader code difficult to analyze. Moreover, shaders typically depend on a particular shading language and platform, which means that work cannot be used in
other contexts. These factors not only limit productivity, but also the settings in which the results can be used. mental mill is the solution to these problems.
The foundation of mental mill is the MetaSLTM shading language, a simple yet expressive language which acts as a hub of shader generation. The MetaSL compiler that is part of mental mill has a plug-in front-end for parsers of other languages and a plug-in back-end to support any target platform. The extensibility of the compiler means that shaders are protected against other languages becoming obsolete and also that shaders can be reused in a variety of settings.
mental mill not only allows users to write shaders which transfer easily, but also encourages the creation of compact components called MetanodesTM , which can be combined into shader networks and PhenomenaTM to create more complicated, visually interesting shaders. The mental mill Graphical User Interface (GUI) provides a visual representation of these shader networks for easy and intuitive manipulation. In fact, the GUI eliminates the need to work directly with code. Shader writers can use it to create, debug and optimize shaders.

A key benefit of mental mill is that it puts more control in the hands of the artists/individuals of all skill levels – therefore it is squarely aimed at developers and 3D artists, as well as other creative individuals in need of shaders.
In the case of a non-technical artist or other game developers in non-engineering roles, mental mill empowers them to create hardware shaders via a graphical interface without coding expertise. The real time feedback lets them see an immediate cause and effect, so they can experiment and learn as they go.
For technical artists, mental mill enables them to create complex shader trees – MetaNodes™ and Phenomena™ - that can be passed along and adhered to less technical individual or teams of artists. They determine/limit the amount of control given to less technical creative staff.
One significant benefit for artists of all levels is that they no longer have to try to communicate their vision to a programmer to interpret, nor do they need to wait for the shaders to be created by coders – thus, avoiding bottlenecks, which benefits the entire development process.
For developers, as well as all users of mental mill, there are a number of benefits such as real-time, visual debugging of shaders. Since the resulting shaders are platform/environment agnostic, mental mill also negates the need to write or rewrite multiple shaders for each configuration. This makes the entire process more efficient.