Rendering tech fires up - big style

It seem that it isn't enough and once again, things are hotting up in the rendering world. Last year Bunkspeed's HyperShot rewrote the book on rendering for product design. HyperShot is quick, easy and dirty. Load model, add materials, choose lighting and background and you're pretty much ready to rock and roll. If only all renders were like that. If you look at what most users face in terms of pain points, it gets a long way to solving many of them.

But it seems things are moving on.

Siggraph is the place to be it seems. Yesterday, Bunkspeed and SpaceClaim announced a partnership that sees HyperShot integrated with SpaceClaim (similar to the work they've already done with SolidWorks and Aesthetica). Today they accounced prerelease details of the next product in their portfolio - HyperMove, an animation tool that looks to do the same as HyperShot for the animation world. it seems that the web-site isn't up and running yet http://www.bunkspeed.com/hypermove

Then as if this wasn't enough, I start to hear about a new Rendering tool from SolidWorks. Rob Rodriguez broke the news of the product name, PhotoView 360, even though I believe an NDA is in place and the product isn't going to be officially launched until September along with the rest of the 2009 release. Then Luxology (developers of Modo) issue a press release talking about the partnership with SolidWorks and the mysts starts to clear.

SolidWorks has licensed Luxology's Nexus 4 rendering engine for PhotoView 360, but as a couple of people have pondered, Nexus 4 includes a variety of modeling, sculpting, rendering, painting and animation capabilities. Are we going to see the sub-divisional modelling tools that have seen rapid adoption of Modo in the CGI industry move into SolidWorks? Time will tell.

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What have Bunkspeed got coming up next?

First there's a teasing press release, then there's hints on the Bunkspeed web-site about its new animation tool, which I believe is called HyperMove.. I'm excited. Really way more excited that I should be. Damn, I wish I was at Siggraph. If anyone's out there, take a look and see what you can find out, because Teger's not telling me anything.

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HyperShot V 1.5 is ready to rock

Sextant Navigation Eye2It Media Console courtesy of Pixelmathematics

Bunkspeed has launched HyperShot V 1.5 with new key enhancements being interaction with all major 3D solid and surface modelling products, as well as even brighter, more realistic photographs rendered even faster from 3D models.

How are they doing that? Let's break it down. Faster Performance is gained through improved real-time raytracing (done with quicker self shadow calcs), better real-time handling of materials on objects without texture coordinates and a cached material library, which will display all materials instantly. And end results are going to be improved with sharper shadows and texture maps in the final rendering and better turntable animation in HyperShot Pro (for the record, I think the turntable animation tools should be in all of the offerings. No pun intended). The translators have also been worked on support for Rhinoceros both on the Mac and Windows, better support for Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4 and better SolidWorks and IGES support.

Since I was 16, I've been fighting with creating realistic looking renders based on accurate CAD data. While many industry pundits love to talk up the amount of time they've spent looking at this software we called CAD, the only reason I say this is that I know exactly how long it takes to create the type of imagery you can see here, and its too dammed long - HyperShot solves many of those bottlenecks. There's a full review of HyperShot 1.5 in this months DEVELOP3D - so reg up and get your copy. If you've already done so, then enter your email address and read at your leisure - there are five copies of HyperShot Web to be won as well, along with a whole host of other goodies.

Oh and its time to confess, we f&*ked up: the cost of the Pro version is not 10 grand, but a much more reasonable 3,495 USD - sorry Thomas.

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Icona takes on Bunkspeed

If you haven't come across Icona Solutions before, it develops a system called Aesthetica which allows both quality engineers and stylists to gauge the effect of manufacturing variation; but does so using a technology which allows both parties to do so using the tools and terminology they are used to. Quality engineers can measure gap and flush and all that good stuff, while the stylists and those responsible for aesthetic quality can inspect the different variants of a product using photo realistic visualisation.

What Icona has done is swap out its existing rendering engine for Bunkspeed's HyperShot, which makes a huge amount of sense.

"This agreement with Bunkspeed enhances our market-leading perceived quality solutions by giving our users the ability to instantly produce photographic-quality images of product variation, with minimal effort but stunning effect", said Tim Illingworth, commercial director, Icona Solutions. "We look forward to working with Bunkspeed in all those manufacturing sectors where improving a product's perceived quality and the need for high quality images are critical to market success", he added.

Version 3 of aesthetica, including the HyperShot integration capability, is scheduled to begin customer shipments in a couple of months time. Oh and HyperShot, if you haven't seen it, is a rendering tool that rocks.

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