Articles tagged with Hypershot

In a slightly misleadingly entitled release, Luxion, developers of KeyShot (one of the replacements for HyperShot) has just sent out a press release about how “Ford relies on KeyShot Technology for Press Images.” While the statement is a wee bit accurate, the truth of the matter is that this is about how critically acclaimed car photographer David Burgess has been using KeyShot as a key part of his workflow for sometime and has just delivered press images for the 2012 Ford Focus - which made its worldwide debut at the 2010 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit.

Since 2006, critically acclaimed car photographer David Burgess has repeatedly used Luxion’s technology to deliver photographic masterpieces of many vehicles - right from his studio, hotel room, or wherever else he may be. Previously, David would photograph cars on location and depend on weather conditions and several staff members to assist with setting up the actual car model. Luxion’s technology gives full control over the lighting and the corresponding reflections in the car model, which in the end, delivers the ultimate artistic control.

This is a growing trend for many within the professional photography space, particularly those working with the automotive field. Automotive photoshoots are hugely costly in terms of time, the resources (camera crew, ground crew, staff from the auto-company etc etc) and shear bloody hassle of shipping five of the next hot car to the gobi desert, Icelandic glacier or indeed, getting permits to shut off a street in Chicago for morning, There’s also the issue of security and those cursed spy shots ruining the expensive launch at a tradeshow. Taking things digital makes huge sense. But what counts is getting the right photographer, with the right team behind them (in some cases) doing the render work and making it look jaw droppingly realistic.

This last week has seen some resolution for those users involved with Bunkspeed’s HyperShot product as their rendering tool of choice. As we discussed a few weeks ago, disagreements between Bunkspeed and Luxion saw the code revert back to the developers, Luxion, while the product name remained with Bunkspeed. Now the mists have cleared somewhat and we’re seeing how things are panning out.

In the Red corner: Bunkspeed Shot

Not too many details except plans and a few images posted to show what the iRay rendered can do.

The Hyper prefix has been dropped, so it’s just SHOT from now on. The product is now being built on Mental Images iRay technology, which allows you to take advantage of both CPU calculation and GPUs - assuming that you have the Nvidia CUDA-enabled graphics hardware in place. The product will start to ship in the second quarter of this year and will be available as a free 30 day trial, an upgrade to all current HyperShot customers, and no charge to all those on maintenance or pre-order (there’s been some concern over this in the comment stream). More info at www.bunkspeed.com/shot

In the Blue Corner: Luxion KeyShot

New Icons and a few tweeks - but KeyShot is what HyperShot users are used to working with.

Luxion is headed up by the team behind the original product, Henrik Wann Jensen and Thomas Teger (formerly of Bunkspeed). The product has been renamed KeyShot (www.keyshot.com) but the same core is still there, using the CPU-based renderer Henrik developed. They’ve just launched the product and it’s available to download here. There are a few things to note here.

• New material library.
• New HDR library - new scenes in partnership with HDRI-locations and LightMap (Developers of HDRLightStudio).
• New data translators - Pro/E isn’t there yet, the SOlidWorks data import is and there’s now IGES and STEP for Mac).
• Snow Leopard Certified for Mac users.

I’ve been playing with the latest cut of the code and it looks like the guys have tweaked things a little - seem a bit snappier in terms of realtime performance and there’s definitely been some work done on the ground shadows, which look much more… realistic. In terms of migration, the team are offering a free upgrade or transition for existing HyperShot users and your content will migrate pretty nicely too with the Migration Assistant (particularly key as KeyShot has a slightly different folder structure for the various components).

Packaging is staying much the same but with the following name and price changes:

KeyShot is $995 and gives you up to 2.1 megapixels realtime rendering resolution, up to 4.1 megapixels offline rendering resolution. KeyShot Pro is $1,995 (which is a $1,500 price drop from HyperShot Pro) and gives you unlimited realtime and offline rendering resolution (64bit OS and 4+GB RAM recommended) and adds a render queue, turntable animation, render in separate process, and region rendering. Subscription to updates for KeyShot Pro is $500 annually and there’s a floating license option too. If you’re in education, there’s a KeyShot for Education version that’s $95. It’ll available now at the store www.keyshot.com/store

An intriguing situation

There you have it. One product became two. Team members swapped and moved and the products got rebranded. I guess what it comes down to is how are both organisations going to perform in the coming months. Yes, in one case, there’s a change of rendering code and approach (the GPU thing might be interesting), but HyperShot was about being effective at producing photorealistic imagery, not just the renderer under the hood. Let’s see. The nice thing to see is that while there’s been a lot of turmoil around the situation, things are settling, users have options and are being treated fairly by both sides. Luxion has hit the ground running and is shipping the product. While there’s been an announcement, there’s no product from Bunkspeed as yet - and the clock’s ticking. Users will be making their decisions based on what’s available now to solve their needs.

Here’s an intriguing situation developing in the rendering and visualisation world. Bunkspeed broke into the rendering world in a storm, providing an easy to use tool that provided instant feedback on your work and enabled the create of stunning imagery in seconds. I’m a fan and you’re probably a fan too.
What most people probably don’t realise, unless you notice the little tag on the splash screen as it starts, is that HyperShot and the underlying technology is licensed from an organisation called Luxion. This is the tech that makes all that real-time ray tracing possible. The technology is the brain child of one Dr. Henrik Wann Jensen - rendering genius and Academy Award winner. Henrik was also the Chief Scientist at Bunkspeed. The key this to reread is one word: was.

I got wind of a change at the tail end of last year as there were rumblings from all manner of places about all not being well at Bunkspeed and the reasons have now become clear. Essentially, Bunkspeed don’t have the license for the ray tracing components that HyperShot is based on. Meaning they can’t sell it anymore. Effective as of the end of December 2009. What’s more, the HyperShot product is now in the hands of Luxion who will continue to develop and sell it. Who is a cofounder of Luxion? Of course, Henrick Wann Jensen. All very confusing indeed, so i contacted both parties to get official statements on the matter. First up, Bunkspeed:

A key piece of licensed technology is no longer available to us as of January 1st.  This means we are unable to offer HyperShot for sale any more.
We are working on some very cool new product that we will have a major announcement about soon that will put further speculation to rest.  You will be the first to hear!

Philip Lunn, CEO, Bunkspeed

Lunn also cleared up two of the most immediate questions. For those on maintenance and support, they “will be provided with our new generation product that is expected in a few months.” Also, if you’re working on current, long term projects, that data within the existing products will be fully transportable to the next generation products.

Now. What about Luxion. I got a rapid response from Dr. Henrik on the subject, which intrigued me greatly. he has this to say:

Here is the summary. HyperShot will remain available. The situation is as follows. Luxion ApS is a separate company. We are the exclusive developer of HyperShot. It is based on our comprehensive set of rendering libraries that we have developed over a period of more than 10 years. HyperShot was sold by Bunkspeed under a license agreement until last year. We ended the license agreement, since Bunkspeed did not pay us the license fees, that we had agreed to, for more than a year. Instead, Luxion will market and sell the HyperShot software.  We expect to make a release shortly.
Cheers,

Henrik Wann Jensen
Chief Scientist and Cofounder
Luxion ApS

There you go. An interesting thing. Luxion has the product and seemingly, the name. Bunkspeed has the customers. Let’s see who wins. I do wonder what HyperShot users make of this. It has something rather special about it, but that specialness is something quite intangible. There are similar technologies (from Luxology and ART-VPS) and it wouldn’t take a great deal to replicate it. Interesting times indeed. And this is the first week of 2010.

This week Apple lifted the lid on Intel’s new Xeon processor, way in advance of the other major workstation vendors, and, much to our amazement, even in advance of Intel itself. The Quad Core chip will feature at the heart of all new Mac Pro desktop systems.

The Xeon version of the Core i7 (Nehalem) chip is no secret, but bizarrely there is still no mention of it on Intel’s website, and from what I understand Intel and all the major workstation vendors won’t ‘officially’ be talking about the new chip until the end of the month.

While it’s intriguing as to why Apple can talk about the processor while other hardware manufacturers can’t, what’s more important is what this chip will offer the CAD/CAM/CAE sector. Intel’s Xeon (Nehalem) is very much like Core i7, but unlike the Core i7 will be available in dual socket workstations. This means heaps of power for multithreaded applications, with the most obvious beneficiary being rendering which scales very well across multiple cores. While dual socket Quad Core workstations have been available for some time, what makes the Xeon (Nehalem) different is that it supports HyperThreading, which splits each physical core in to two. The first part of the core does the lion’s share of processing, while the other part squeezes in additional computational tasks as and when there is spare capacity.

For a dual processor Xeon workstation this means access to 16 cores in total (eight physical and eight logical) and while many CAD/CAM/CAE applications can’t take advantage of multi core processors, let alone HyperThreading, applications like 3ds Max, HyperShot and CAD-resident renderers will lap it up, so expect never been seen before levels of processing power on the desktop.

If you can’t wait until the end of the month, when all the major workstation manufacturers will be announcing their new Xeon (Nehalem) based workstation line ups, you could always go out and get your hands on a shiny new Mac Pro. After all, as Al Dean points out in his comment in the March edition of DEVELOP3D, Macs are back in a big way! Register here to make sure you bag yourself a copy.

Rendered in HyperShot, using HDR environment from HDRLighting.com

A little late, but HyperShot 1.8 is out and perhaps the one thing that existing users have been waiting for is finally implimented – decals. or for those of us without funny accents – stickers! This means that you have a great deal more control over how both textures and decals are applied, whether they’re on a single part or across multiple parts. This is current built into non-transparent materials, including Metal, Anisotropic, Metallic Paint, Plastic, Diffuse, and Flat.

Other updates for this release include the ability automatically assign materials when importing data and to control values in dialogs using a dial, rather than tapping in values manually (mouse wheel support for this might have been useful too). There’s also been some work done on the quality of blur when you’re using Depth of Field – which is previous release can be more than a little noisey – this new release should give you a much ‘cleaner’ blur (if that makes any form of sense).

Render by Inovo Design for its client, Motonica

HyperShot is sold on a similar pricing scheme to that of digital cameras – higher resolution and more features costs more. For those working with the Pro version, the batch and render queue has been tweaked to run the render queue in a seperate process (for those using multi-core machines – which makes massive sense in this instance).

With HyperShot 2.0 on its way soon, HyperMove shipping (look out for a full review in the next issue of Develop3D), Bunkspeed are going at it. Big Time. And with Autodesk on the offensive with Showcase both in a technological sense and pricing (it’s been dropped to $995), they need to keep up the momentum they’ve already built in the short two years. HyperShot 1.8 is available for free to existing users and ready. Nice Video below:

Bunkspeed just announced that Tesla Motors is using HyperShot and HyperDrive for the creation of all launch imagery of their all-new Tesla Roadster Sports Edition. This vehicle is being launched this month at NAIAS 2009 in Detroit.

According to the press release, “When Tesla Motors was presented with the unique opportunity to secure a booth at this year’s Detroit auto show, the company decided to use this event to launch their new roadster in a completely distinct way. The company decided on an all-virtual launch of their car which will become available in the spring of 2009. Considering the short amount of time to prepare for the event, the design and marketing team at Tesla Motors was looking for a quick and efficient way to create photographic images of the highest quality from their 3D digital data. Bunkspeed’s HyperDrive and HyperShot were the obvious choice.”

Something else in the press release that I found fascinating was a comment from Franz von
Holzhausen, Chief Designer of Tesla Motors. He commented “The Bunkspeed tools integrate seamlessly within Tesla’s workflow. We make quick decisions on digital models and want to carry the use and interaction with digital models for interior and exterior work through the entire design process. I personally use HyperShot on my MacBook Pro. I love how quickly and easily I can evaluate the design in real-time with photographic quality.”

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a huge fan of what Bunkspeed are doing with HyperShot. Rendering is so typically a difficult and time consuming process and as a result, is often used sparingly. By make it more efficient, not only in terms of assigning materials and setting up shots of a product, but also calculating results in a very efficient manner, what they’ve done is do exactly what Franz points out - they’ve made rendering a decision making tool.

To learn more about the Tesla Roadster Sports Edition and their use of Bunkspeed’s
technology, visit Tesla Motors booth at the NAIAS 2009 in Detroit from January 11-25.

This is pretty cool. ARTVPS (which stands for Advanced Render Technology - Virtual Photography Solutions - snappy eh?) has been active in the rendering and visualization business for years with its RenderDrive, Pure cards and RayBox products. These worked with 3dsmax and Maya to use custom hardware (using an ART-VPS design ray tracing chipset) to accelerate the ray tracing calculation times to mere fractions of what they would be with a standard workstation. And with some tweaks that the company also added to the host applications (such as really usable depth of field), the images that could be produced were breathtaking.

Of course, today multi-core machines, and rapidly advancing graphics card tech means that those hardware acceleration solutions have become a little dedundant. ShaderLight is ART-VPS’ next core technology. As you’ll see its integrated into 3dsmax, but the company has plans elsewhere. Now, its video time:

Watch and learn. See how the scene doesn’t all recalc massively when you play with materials/textures and light sources - now that’s slick and appears to be an interesting step on from standard progressive rendering. With Bunkspeed, Luxology and now ARTVPS back in the game, perhaps 2009 is going to be year where rendering finally gets easy.

ALSO: This looked cool too - FryRender Swap for swapping out materials in real time.