Where do all the shaders and Phenomena come from?
mental ray ships with the base, physics, and contour shader libraries, including source code. In addition, it provides optimized shader packages for architectural and design visualization, car paint shading, subsurface scattering, and shaders targeting film production like 2.5d post motion blur. All OEM versions ship with the corresponding vendor-specific shader libraries. Custom shader writing is fully supported and described in the mental ray books and manual. Shaders can be connected to complex visual effects called Phenomena (a generalized form of shader graphs). Some vendors provide graphical user interfaces for creating Phenomena.
