Welcome to the mental cloud Forum!

We have just updated the available versions of mental ray and RealityServer on the current 1.0.5 version of the mental cloud direct image on Amazon's EC2.

New versions:
  • mental ray 3.8.1.28
  • RealityServer 3.0, including Documentation and AppLab

Both, mental ray and RealityServer include iray, if you want to give that a try. Older mental ray versions are still included in the image for compatibility with corresponding DCC application versions.

New regions:
  • US-West (Northern California)
  • Asia-Pacific (Singapore)

Especially for RealityServer, choosing a EC2-region that is close to your location is crucial to run fast-responding, low-latency applications.

The 1.0.5 mental cloud direct image is the ideal starting point to test drive RealityServer 3.0. Pricing starts with 0.68 USD per hour on the "large" instance type, which is the smallest X86-64 instance on EC2 and gives you a decent performance for smaller test applications. You can be up&running with RealityServer within five minutes and Applab and all documentation and tutorials are included.

Please, read the intro page at cloud.mental.com/direct/ carefully, especially the part on how to create a suitable security group. As the mental cloud direct image on EC2 contains fully licensed, unrestricted versions (that you could use for commercial operations, if you like), they are license protected and need a license server which is readily set up and running for you, but needs to contact your instance from time to time.

We're interested in your comments on mental cloud direct, either here in the forum or contact us privately at cloud-support[at]mental.com.