NVIDIA launches GPU based ray tracing at Siggraph

NVIDIA has announced that it can calculate ray traced imagery on the fly using its GPUs, claiming an industry first. Based purely on NVIDIA GPU technology, the ray tracer shows "linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application." if you want to get down and dirty, then the image shown here was displayed at three bounces, performance was demonstrated at up to 30 frames per second (fps) at HD resolutions of 1920x1080 for an image-based lighting paint shader, ray traced shadows, and reflections and refractions running on four next-generation Quadro GPUs in an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (VCS).

Now, I know ray tracing is incredibly complex and calc heavy, but, really, if this is an industry first, shouldn't these images look better? I guess my point is that whether its full ray tracing, or fudged (some systems, like Autodesk Showcase, have some tricks to get over the calc hurdle), I think today's users expect more in terms of depth of realism.

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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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ARTVPS Releases AV6.5 ART Renderer

ART-VPS has released a new version of its ART Renderer which updates support for the latest revisions of 3ds Max and Maya and brings some new goodies to users. One of the biggest bottlenecks is the creation of accurate lighting and scene set-up to ensure your product rendering looks absolutely photo realistic.

If you haven't come across ART-VPS (it stands for Advanced Render Technology - Virtual Photography Systems) it developers raytracing acceleration hardware in the form of standalone devices (RayBox and RenderDrive) as well as component cards for your workstation (Pure). New options include a new 'infinity cove' and 'sphere' options within a skylight feature allowing you to alter the shape of the environment dome upon which your HDR image is going to be mapped. The new real-time reflection feature enables users to view ART materials and HDR reflections in real time, giving you instant feedback and real-time environment shading reduces test renders.

There's also a bunch of other updates including quicker GI (Global Illumination) calcs, added support for Microsoft Vista and RayBox monitoring system now runs better on Mac OSX.

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Microsoft Touch Screen TouchWall

Seems like Josh over at SolidSmack.com got to it first, but this looks sweet. Its a hacked together rear projection unit with some fancy bits and bobs running on Vista. What's interesting is the multi-touch manner. A lot of the CAD vendors are talking about this as the future - SolidWorks went multi-touch crazy at their press event preceding the last SolidWorks World. I wonder how it could be packaged up - maybe some sort of hand held device like the Wacom's Cintiq maybe. One thing's for sure, we all ain't gonna be standing in front of a wall to get the job done are we?

As a recent convert to the Apple platform and owner of a macbook air, I have to say multi touch is pretty compelling - as this technology develops, its going to be interesting to see how its implemented in CAD systems. Of course, most of my work is done on a big old workstation running windows, but I do my writing on OSX.. but if I do fancy designing something, I now have the early test version of Rhino for the Mac - and that has multi-touch implemented in a very subtle manner.

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New PhotoWorks book from Rob Rodriguez

Rob Rodriguez has a new book out for those of you looking for some assistance with PhotoWorks. One thing that's always baffled me is the complexity of PhotoWorks. Yes, you can produce stunning imagery, but it Takes A Lot of Time. Rob's book is surely a good place to start if you're looking for more information on how to step up your rendering and visualisation skills.

What I love about the wealth of books coming out of the user community is that they are exactly that - books. Printed matter. And people like books, they aren't a throw away PDF that's hard to track down, but something tangible that you can pick up, flick through and learn something from.

Pre-order details are here

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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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