MDL SDK
NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language (MDL) is used in its rendering solutions NVIDIA Iray and NVIDIA mental ray to describe the visual properties of the
rendered geometry. Compared to traditional shading languages it follows a novel approach in describing appearance in a renderer independent manner.
The MDL specification is freely available from MDL-Materials
NVIDIA has developed a number of technologies to support MDL in its own rendering solutions. We make those available for licensing as part of the MDL SDK. The MDL SDK liberates developers from having to write and maintain their own compilers to support MDL. It provides an optimized, easy to inspect view on the material definition as well as backends for compiling texturing functions for use on GPU as well as CPU.
Contact DesignWorks for availability and licensing terms.
- For use on GPU as well as CPU
- Supports MDL 1.2
- Support for MDL's module system. Import and export of mdl modules including dependencies.
- Database view on the imported MDL package space
- MDL editing. Create instances of functions and materials and connect them to create new materials with new interfaces.
- Compile materials into DAG's allowing renderers to inspect the material model
- Several compilation modes fitting different rendering requirements (class compilation, instance compilation)
- Optimization: Inlining, dead code elimination, complete evaluation of uniform subgraphs of the DAG on copmile
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Backends for compilation of texturing functions
- PTX
- LLVM IR
- GLSL
| Platforms | Windows, Linux and Mac |
|---|---|
| Links | MDL Materials |