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From Odwiki

Features of mantra:

• Several render modes:
  • MicroPolygon renderer (with variable ShadingQuality and various Measurers to control Dicing), with raytracing for secondary rays; a hybrid.
  • RayTrace rendering for primary rays
  • PhysicallyBasedRendering (PBR)
  • Photon renderer for rendering photon maps for direct and indirect illumination
• Bucket Rendering : enables rendering of large images without a large impact on RAM usage
• Full RayTracing
  • GatherLoops, Occlusion, Irradiance and PathTracing support
  • Geometry can be PreDiced to accelerate raytracing - particularly good for displaced or higher-order surfaces such as SubdivisionSurfaces.
• Sub-pixel DisplacementMapping
  • Displacements can be ReDiced to provide non-linear displacements.
• IPR Rendering (Interactive Photorealistic Rendering): Caching of rendered samples which allow accelerated re-rendering of images to make the lighting and shader-building process faster and more interactive. This accelerates:
  • Lighting changes
  • Shader changes
  • Certain renderer parameter changes, such as PixelFilter and so on.
  • Intermixing of "live" object rendering with IPR pre-rendered caches of objects.
• Many renderable geometry types include:
  • Polygon surfaces
  • SubdivisionSurface rendering from Polygons
  • Metaball : Direct rendering of the limit surface (micropolygon and raytraced) including displacement mapping and motion-blur.
  • NURBS surface rendering
  • Open Curves and Polygons are rendered as ribbons (oriented to camera or custom) - useful for fast hair rendering.
  • Volume primitive type for full volumetric rendering
• Supports procedural geometry generation at render-time called MantraProcedurals
  • ReadFromFileProcedural : (Delayed) Read Archives for rendering geometry directly from disk when necessary.
  • SpriteProcedural: Sprite rendering
  • Houdini can be invoked to supply geometry at render-time. HScriptInstancingProcedural
  • User extensible in the HDK.
• Programmable Shaders (MantraShaders are written in VEX code, and see VEXUsageTips)
  • VEX allows access to VEXPointClouds which offer accelerated methods for computing phenomenon such as SubsurfaceScattering, GlobalIllumination and many other effects. PointClouds can also be written out from shaders.
• VEXProfiling for determining crucial areas in shaders
• C++ programmable extensions in the HoudiniDevelopmentKit
  • VEXDSOs for extending the shading language
  • Procedural DSOs for generating geometry. See MantraProcedurals.
• GlobalIllumination support, and general cone-angle sampling in all raytracing operations.
  • AmbientOcclusion
  • Irradiance with IrradianceCache
  • PhotonMapping for indirect and direct illumination.
  • GlobalIlluminationCache can be generated to accelerate and improved rendering and re-rendering of GI.
• Fast MotionBlur (VelocityBlur, DeformationBlur (unlimited multisegment), TransformationBlur (unlimited multisegment)
  • 3D raytraced motionblur
  • MotionFactor : variable dicing of objects to accelerate rendering of objects with a large amount of MotionBlur
• SuperSampling
• MultiProcessing : for single frames distributed amongst several workstations ( Remote Rendering)
• MultiThreading : for using all the CPUs or Cores on a local workstation
• Instancing (see MantraInstancing) for rendering multiple similar subnets/objects/lights/etc without a negative RAM impact:
  • GeometryInstancing
  • LightInstancing
  • PointInstancing : instance geometry/lights/etc on points
• DepthOfField : enhancedBokeh support
• DeepRaster (ArbitraryOutputVariables) support
• FieldRendering
• PanoramicProjection rendering
• ShaderUnwrapping
• Cross Platform : Linux, Windows, IRIX and Solaris
• HDRI rendering
• MipMap textures (for good TextureFiltering and low RAM usage)
• Wide variety of FileFormats
• AreaLight support
• IFDArchives : archiving via IFD snippets
• DeepShadow and DepthMap generation for ShadowMapping
• Python integration
  • PythonFiltering : for overriding sections of the scene description
  • PythonTileCallbacks: for custom python callbacks between rendered tiles