Ok - so I wasn’t all that quick with the update to this series (first part is here) - magazine deadlines and trips to Legoland got in the way, along with an all too brief spell of sunny weather that just itched to be taken advantage of. Anyway, back on the subject of rendering - and what I want to talk about this time around is HDR images and their use in rendering.

If you want Wikipedia’s version of the truth, it’s this:

High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging

To put it another way, in my own words:

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, in opposition to Low Dynamic Range images, or pretty much every graphics format out there. The difference between the two relates to the amount of data the image file stores about the intensity of the light in an image. Whereas standard image formats capture a scene based purely on colour, HDR images also capture a lot of information about the intensity of the light at each pixel, as well as colour. While they’re used in photographic circles, their use has become widespread in computer graphics technology because they can be used to capture and reuse light in a much more efficient manner. They’re most commonly used in combination with spherical panorama style images which capture a full 360 degree image of a particular situation or scene. Source: Me.

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Just got off a call with the guys at Autodesk about what’s new in the Alias product line, as, as ever, it got passed over pretty quickly during yesterday’s roll-out.

Alias Design for Inventor: This is bundled in with Alias Design, the entry level to the industrial design and complex surfacing product. Essentially, it brings edge-based complex modelling tools to Inventor and allows you to manipulate solid geometry using edges and points to create complex geometry that would be difficult to do with Inventor’s existing surfacing tools. it focussed on geometry manipulation and gives you G1 and G2 continuity controls and allows you to control where face patches are required to be smooth and where they need to be hard edges. The data is stored as an explicit feature within Inventor’s history/feature tree.

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Rendering is something that many designers and engineers are adopting. The benefits are pretty well established, if you can show your non-technical peers an image that represents a concept, a future product in a photo realistic manner, so that there’s no need for interpretation, then they get a better understanding.

Decisions become easier as everyone has the same basis for their thoughts and you have a real feel for those things will look. While aesthetic quality isn’t paramount in many products, but the facts are that a photorealistic rendering speaks volumes for even the most seemingly mundane product.

But alongside these benefits, the rendering process can take some learning. Almost every 3D design tool includes rendering tools and technologies, there is always a learning curve. Yes, things have become much easier with the introduction of tools such as KeyShot/HyperShot/Shot, PhotoView 360 and the like, there’s still a couple of key things to consider. So, my plan is cover a few of things over the next few months and see where we get to, assist you getting the best out of the process. After all, rendering is often a side issue for those using the tools and technology in the context of mainstream engineering and design - its another thing to squeeze in.

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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.

The product development technology industry is an intriguing one. Like many industries there are various levels of user, various levels of developer and various levels of component technology providers. While for those that aren’t deeply embedded in the industry, much of the interaction, deals and licensing goes on out of public view. Does the user really want to know where the various component technologies that make up their workhorse products come from? In the majority of instances, no, probably not, but I think there is some value in talking a little bit about where many of the technologies come from. I was reminded about this just last week at SolidWorks World when I bumped into an good friend, Joe Walsh, a gentleman that I’ve come to know over the course of many years.

Joe’s been around the industry for years, yet unlike the head-grabbing names and faces we’re all familiar with, he’s relatively unknown by the user community. Joe’s been around the industry, having worked at FEGS (now part of Transcendata), Spatial and IronCAD to name but a few.

Until recently, Joe worked with an organisation called Simmetrix. That company developed and sold a component technology widely used in many of the simulation codes we use on a daily basis. In specific it provides geometry and mesh handling tools that allow the mesh based world of simulation to talk to the geometry-based world of 3D CAD, that allows rapid mesh generation and simulation data management.

In January I got the inevitable LinkedIn job update and he’s now set-up an organisation called intrinSim and I finally got a chance to sit and have a chat about what it is that he and his team are up to.

When you look at the development and component community within this industry, many organisations license the same technology from the same partners. There are those ‘household’ names like Siemens’ PLM Components group (that supply Parasolid, D-Cubed) and Dassault’s Spatial (ACIS, data translation tools). Alongside this, there are organisations that provide a wide variety of services, such as TechSoft3D, who develop and sell core technology such as HOOPS as well as reselling 3D Interop tools from Spatial, Parasolid and Autodesk’s RealDWG.

Now, to those not familiar with how this works, it might seem odd that you have multiple organisations developing their own products, but also reselling the products from other vendors. The reason is that it’s a single source of acquisition for vendors looking to license multiple components.

Joe’s new organisation is set to jump into the industry with a set of tools that differs from the existing tools out there, but to accomplish the same task. He’s set-up intrinSIM to do much the same but with a simulation focus. Alongside the Simmetrix products, he’ll also be taking Datakit’s data translation tools, simulation results compression, visualisation and collaboration tools from VCollab (which I’ll be looking at in a few months time) and the tools from EASA that help bring applications to the web and mobile devices. It looks like an interesting product stack and with Joe’s experience I’m sure you’ll be seeing some of this technology show up your workhorse tools at some point soon.

The point of telling you all this is to make the point that if you’re looking to find out where much of design and engineering technology is heading towards, there’s a case for playing close attention to the component suppliers and technology developers as there is to the vendors themselves. If you want to get an idea of what’s coming in say, SolidWorks, then read Parasolid related press releases - you’ll get a heads up before everyone else.

This came in from Autodesk’s rocking PR team while I was out in California, but as long time readers of the blog will know, I can resist a bit of music mixing it up with some righteous 3D technology use. According to the press release, VOX Amplification has started to use Inventor and Showcase to assist with the design of four newly minted guitar amplifiers, the AC30C2 and the AC15C1 Custom Series, as well as the AC15VR and the AC30VR.

The press release states that VOX have been used by numerous influential bands and musicians.* Reality is, if you’re a gear-head, the AC30 brings back memories and smells of vintage tube amps warming up for some abuse, from the Stones to Radiohead and all points in between. If you’ve picked up a guitar, then you’ve probably plugged into or wanted to plug into a VOX amp or stomped on a VOX Wah pedal (as Hendrix did) at some point.  So let’s look at the details.

Dave Clarke, product development manager, VOX’s UK-based R&D centre said “In today’s economic climate, we need to react fast to market trends. Creating digital prototypes with Inventor software and using Showcase for 3D visualization reduces costs and cuts development time in half. Digital prototypes help save money by reducing the need for more costly physical prototypes. With Showcase, we’re able to make real-time changes to a design and quickly reach a concept that the whole team is happy with. This significantly reduces time to market.”

For those that are unfamiliar with Showcase, it’s probably the best kept secret in Autodesk’s Manufacturing solutions division and it combines real-time design evaluation, presentation and photo realistic rendering all in one wicked package.

Design Goals

VOX wanted to maintain the quality and iconic look of its AC30 amplifier, while adding modern design features, improving serviceability and lowering the price point. The result is the new AC30C2 Custom Series. For the more affordable AC15VR and AC30VR amplifiers, it was important to keep manufacturing costs down while maintaining the renowned VOX sound quality. The economical amps also needed a look that distinguished them from the company’s premium Custom Series offering.

Digital Prototyping with Inventor Software

Inventor software was used to help design and digitally prototype the new amplifiers, reducing the need for multiple costly physical prototypes. VOX also developed cost-effective manufacturing processes using Inventor software, enabling the company to achieve target price points. 

“We wanted a more accessible price point for the AC30C2 Custom Series, but there was no way we would sacrifice quality,” said Clarke. “Using Inventor for the mechanical design of the Custom Series, we were able to more quickly prototype construction techniques that achieved the best possible quality and value. We did the same thing with the AC15VR and AC30VR amps.”



3D Visualization with Autodesk Showcase Software

VOX used Autodesk Showcase software for real-time 3D visualization, creating highly realistic digital imagery of the new products before they were built. 3D visualization helped VOX to more quickly refine and finalize aesthetic decisions, before physical prototypes were built. 

“The biggest challenge we faced when launching the new AC30 was adding cool features while remaining true to our roots,” said Clarke. “We used Showcase to help make and finalize cosmetic decisions at the earliest possible stage of the design process. Creating near photo-realistic visualizations also helped eliminate the need for small but costly changes further down the line, which saved a lot of time and money. We also used Showcase from the start of the conceptual design phase for the AC15VR and AC30VR amps,” added Clarke. “The software’s real-time visualization capabilities helped us determine the precise differences between the VR Series and the premium Custom Series.”

So. Here’s the obligatory music video. Hmm. Could I link up some of the righteous riffing from Brian May’s live shows with Queen? nope. Gallows. London is the Reason from the best album of last year. Crank It.

* They’re also endorsed by The Edge of U2 and Chad Kroeger of Nickleback - and yes. I threw up a wee bit just typing this sentence.

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.

Model courtesy of Mark van der Quaak, dppb (www.dbbp.com).

This just in from DEVELOP3D’s Mac:Design sister site: I’ll make no bones about it. I love rendering. From when I started in the world of 3D-based design, I used to dig into 3d Studio when it was a DOS product and horrendous to use. All the way through my professional career as a designer, it stayed with me and even when I moved into the world of publishing I found myself still engaged (and still do, to this day) in freelance gigs.

There’s something engaging and addictive about taking staid, boring looking CAD geometry that’s at the heart of the design process through to create photorealistic assets (be it imagery or animations) that shows the viewer exactly how that product is going to appear when manufactured.

The problem has, until very recently, been that rendering, both to set-up the scenes, materials, textures, lighting then processing that information, has a headache. to create truly photorealistic images takes time and skill to do, then, when you’ve got it about right, even with today’s ultra powerful machines, took time to process – and when you consider that creating that imagery (whether it be static images or animations) was typically a highly iterative process of set-up, test render, tweak, render again, the whole thing took more time than it should have.

This, I’m glad to say, has changed in the last year or so. There are a number of applications launched onto the market that make this process much more efficient. Progressive rendering technology, whereby you don’t have to wait for a render to complete before you get a good idea of what your project look, makes things easier. This, combined with technologies like HDR (High Dynamic Range) images that make lighting set-up much easier as well as multi-core processing workstations (progressive renderers are typically CPU driven). One of the leading lights of this movement has been Bunkspeed (www.bunkspeed.com), established a few years ago, to bring a core technology to market that enables the 3D user to create stunningly photorealistic imagery, without the headaches traditionally associated with the process and the flagship product in the company’s portfolio is HyperShot.

HyperShot was launched two years ago and has been growing in popularity amongst many industry sectors and professions since. The core concept is that you connect to your CAD data, read it in, add materials, choose an environment (based on HDR images, which contain both scene information and a greater amount of information about lighting conditions within that scene than standard images) and watch the display update to show you what you’re going to get. While it’s heavily skewed towards the number of CPUs or core you have your workstation, even on the most modest of laptops, Hypershot gives you update speeds that are close enough to real-time.

Now, while HyperShot isn’t a unique application in using this type of technology, the things I’ve always loved about it are two fold. Firstly, it’s both Windows and Mac-based and has been since the very early releases and secondly, the interface is so sparse, typically driven by keyboard shortcuts and mouse interaction, rather than complex dialogs. This makes for a very intuitive working process and if I’m honest, it get very very addictive. HyperShot’s been through a pretty rapid release cycle in the last two years and while the latest version, 1.9, has just been released, the last few months have also seen the Beta program for the next major release, HyperShot 2.0, get underway.

HyperShot 2.0?

Image courtesy of Peter Allen, Marketing Director at UC Santa Barbara.

I first got a peak at HyperShot for Mac’s next major release at the PTC World user event last this year and saw something that took my breath away. While many organisations are looking to ‘go mac’ of late, it’s not often you find a 3D professional application that is atuned to the Mac way of things working and following the Cocoa UI guidelines closely. But this is what the Bunkspeed team has been working on and I can finally begin to lift the lid of what HyperShot 2.0, or as it’s to be called, HyperShot ‘10 is going to bring to the Mac community. Before we do that, I wanted to get an insight into what Bunkspeed have planned, I got on the phone to Thomas Teger.

Thomas is the Director of Marketing and Strategic Planning at Bunkspeed (you’ll guess that from the picture, right?) and one of those people I love running into at the various events – mostly because he’s 19 feet tall and because he’s German, can enjoy a drink without disappearing off to bed at 10pm. Thomas is a CAD industry veteran, having worked at both PTC and UGS (now Siemens PLM) and was influential in bringing both NX to the Mac and driving the development of a now defunct PTC product called Pro/Concept (also Mac-based). These days, he’s one of the four provisional patent holders for HyperShot (together with Founder & CEO Philip Lunn, COO Anthony Duca, and Chief Scientist Dr. Henrik Wann Jensen), and the driving force behind any new development for HyperShot. His passion for the Mac and Apple products started in 1992 while writing his Master’s Thesis on a PowerBook 170 at BMW AG in Munich, Germany.

Al Dean: Hey Thomas. Let’s talk about HyperShot and the Mac. You’ve had a Mac native version of HyperShot pretty much since inception. Could you explain why you made that choice?

Thomas Teger: When I first saw the concepts of realtime raytracing that turned into HyperShot in early 2006 I knew that this had great potential in a number of markets. Since HyperShot breaks down the barriers of traditional raytracing, it opens up the door for many more people who would never been able to create a photographic image from 3D data. The Mac community is traditionally all about the creativity. Photographers, retouchers, marketing people – all Mac. This made it easy to decide to port HyperShot to the Mac. On top of it, HyperShot has been built on an incredible advanced, flexible, and state of the art architecture. “Porting” – if you want to call it that – to the Mac was basically “free”. When we showed the concept of HyperShot in 2006 at the IDSA international conference in Austin, TX, we had both versions running side by side. It was awesome.

AD: How does the Mac user base stack up against the windows variant?

TT: Our Mac user base is at about 10% of our entire install base and growing strongly. More and more people are converting to the Mac, now that you can have dual boot capability. Students in particular are gravitating very strongly to the Mac, but also more and more design houses. Of course you know what the major obstacle is: the support of common CAD formats on the Mac. When we came out with the Mac version of HyperShot, we only offered support for OBJ. Quite limiting, isn’t it? Today we are offering support for native Rhino and SketchUp, as well as OBJ, Collada, FBX, and 3ds.

AD: I’ve been playing with the HyperShot 2.0 Beta and the interface has been shifted to a Cocoa-based UI. It’s looking slick. How much more work have you got to do before you take 2.0 to market?

Image courtesy of Carter Hickman Design (www.carterhickmandesigns.com) TT: Thanks, Al. We worked long and hard on developing the interface that turns HyperShot into a true Mac application that will be appreciated and embraced by all Mac users out there. As you know we have started our beta program about 4 weeks ago. We started with a small team of 10 people representing various industries. With the improvements that we made over the past few weeks we are close to being feature complete, and the app is also very stable. Some folks like Carter Hickman for example are using v2 4 hours a day to do production work. He can’t go back – you saw his comments. Same with Peter Allen from UC Santa Barbara. The biggest hurdle right now is to make sure that everything works with Snow Leopard. And then there is some more cleanup required, bug fixes and UI polish for the most part. We are close! The official name will be HyperShot ‘10 to match the rest of our product line. Following the Apple lead here ... iPhoto ‘09, iLife ‘09, iWork ‘09 – you get the picture . AD: One thing that’s kind of irritating is that the Mac platform has much fewer translation options that the Windows version (predominatelty, the SolidWorks and Pro/E connectors are missing). Could you give me an explanation of why they don’t work on the mac platform? TT: Agreed – as mentioned above this is a big reason for the adoption rate still being small is the lack of support for traditional CAD formats. We are getting many requests for support of additional file formats. IGES, STEP, and SolidWorks are the top requests, followed by the support for AliasStudio Tools. I am happy to announce that we will support IGES and STEP in version 2. I am personally rather disappointed that SolidWorks is not releasing the API for eDrawings on the Mac. It is so close. This would solve my, or better the users problem. I’ve asked repeatedly for it, but the answer was always “sorry, not available”. On the other hand we allow people to run HyperShot on the Windows side with the same license, as long as it is installed on the machine. So if you have SolidWorks or Pro/E installed on the Windows side, install HyperShot and the plugin (free on our website) and then import your CAD files into HyperShot and save out the .bip file. And then continue to work on the Mac side. Works great. AD: Any plans to bring HyperMove or HyperDrive to the Mac TT: Plans – yes, time frame – no. We are carefully evaluating the needs and market requirements here. AD: Have you got a feeling for any performance difference between Windows and Mac? Anything to be gained? TT: Since HyperShot is 100% CPU based you are getting identical performance on either platform in realtime. I found though that the final rendering is about 10% faster on Mac OS X compared to Windows Vista 64bit. Even though the realtime performance is identical on Windows and Mac OS X, it still “looks and feels” better on the Mac. There is just something about the Mac – it is hard to describe. AD: Is the Snow Leopard release giving you any headaches? TT: I’ve been running Snow Leopard since the day after it came out and have not experienced any problems with the current version of HyperShot. I have a few customers that are reporting some issues, so I will need to figure out what is going on. We are experiencing some unexplainable things with HyperShot ‘10 that work great under Leopard but fail under Snow Leopard. That is now our major focus until the release – make sure that everything is working flawlessly under both Leopard and Snow Leopard. Tiger, by the way, will no longer be supported. AD: I’ve heard (mostly from your competitors, I’ll admit) all manner of rumours about Bunkspeed. Do you want to clear those up and talk about the company’s performance in the last few years and how you’re doing in the market place? TT: Absolutely, Al. Bunkspeed is stronger than ever. The fact is that Bunkspeed is 100% self funded and profitable since year two of its inception (Bunkspeed was founded in 2002 by Philip Lunn, CEO of Bunkspeed). HyperShot has been incredibly successful since its introduction in June of 2007. To date we have close to 2,000 customers that are using HyperShot on a daily basis. We started out really strong in Industrial Design, and are now tapping more into Engineering, and of course marketing. We are very successful in “building the bridge” from design and engineering all the way into marketing. Despite economic downturn, our year to date revenues are up compared to last year. As companies are cutting cost, they still order more software from us to help with that process. We certainly made some internal adjustments earlier in the year to make sure we focus on areas that promise growth. We are still a small company, so we must be careful on how we spend our money and where to ensure maximum return on investment. Rumors where of course fueled by the fact that we didn’t have a presence at Siggraph this year, since we had a fairly large previous two years. We carefully evaluated the situation. Fact is that many companies cut down on “unnecessary” expenses and would not send any representatives, and trade show attendance was the first one to be cut. Also, Siggraph for us has been a branding event more so than a revenue generator. We felt that our brand has been well established in the industries we are going after – ID, Engineering, and Marketing. This was another reason for us to sit this one out. We are continuing to focus on being present at other events that cater to our markets we are going after such as user conferences and IDSA conferences (Industrial Designers Society of America). Being part of the PTC User conference this year for example opened up many doors to new accounts. As I said before, Bunkspeed is stronger than ever and poised for some serious growth. Later this week, I’m going to give you a sneak peak into what’s coming up in the next release, so stay tuned.