Version 7.9 to make light work of rendering

New Ambient Occlusion functionality has been added to LightWorks' latest release, offering intelligent, predictable realistic lighting for rendering.

Targeted at the AEC sector, with the new lighting settings aimed primarily for interiors, the imaging for product touts it as a universal lighting solution with a wide range of lighting effects. A range of new shaders offer users more realistic effects, allowing the creation of glossy plastics, brushed metals, car paints, varnished surfaces and lacquered finishes. All of which is good news for the users of the 80 software applications that have LightWorks embedded.

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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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Reading Matter: Designing Interaction

I don't really want this to turn into a book review blog, but there have been some amazing publications in the last few years. One of my personal favourites is Designing Interaction by IDEO founder, Bill Moggridge. For anyone involved in design, in product development, its chock full of interview and studies of how designers are adapting to accomodate how users interact with their products, be that by software, hardware - whatever. One of my favourite chapters is an interview with Kenji Hatori, a software engineer at Canon who developed PhotoStitch. It describes the stitch assist mode for cameras and Rikako recounts the process used to design the screen behaviors for the PhotoStitch software, with a clear structure indicated by tabs and actions clarified by animations. The book is supplied with a DVD that's worth sitting a watching (and yup, boring your families with) - a great deal can be learned. You can see a video of the interview here.

If we're to develop truly stunning products, whatever field they are active in, then the whole user experience needs to be address - and its something that CAD vendors should take note of - more so now than every before. The technology we use to develop products seems to be getting easier to handle, but without some form of forethought, some sort of rationalisation, its all for nothing. and again, the question of whether the Microsoft Ribbon UI is the way forward spring to mind. We develop in 3D - should our tools follow the same UI characteristics as Word, Excel and Outlook. Familiarity is the reason that vendors have jumped all over it. the argument being that if you can drive Word or Outlook, you can drive SolidWorks, SpaceClaim, Inventor et al. I'm not convinced.http://www.designinginteractions.com/

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New Tools for Rhino - Brazil Beta & Photogrammetry

Word is coming out of McNeel & Associates that there are two new add-ons coming on stream for surface modelling master, Rhino. Firstly, there's a brand new beta for Brazil, the photo realistic rendering add-on for Rhino. Updates include a new 'Graph' section to most textures which displays a graph of the texture's red, green, blue, alpha or luminosity along one axis. There are also a range tools for precisely defining sun direction and position which will be mostly useful for those working with Architectural visualisation. Other updates include a context menu to the color button, implementation of Brazil's Advanced Global Fog Environment implemented..

There's also Rhinophoto, Photogrammetry plugin for Rhino and provides automatic 3D digitizing from a set of photographs. having had a quick look at the web-site, this tool looks pretty impressive for those wanted to reconstruct 3D models (for whatever purposes), using some standard digital cameras and a bit of time. There are some good tutorials which give you a solid idea of what's involved in the systems use.

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