| CUDA APPS | |
| Bunkspeed Launches GPU-Accelerated 3D Rendering Software | |
| Bunkspeed, provider of simplified 3D rendering and animation software, has released Bunkspeed SHOT, an interactive 3D application that brings the power of the GPU to creative professionals. The new version, which acts as a "camera" for 3D data, incorporates innovative iray technology from mental images and runs on NVIDIA Quadro, Tesla and GeForce platforms. Background: Bunkspeed brought interactive ray tracing (a rendering method that simulates light reflections, refractions and shadows) to the market in 2007 but it was limited to the CPU. The new Bunkspeed SHOT leverages CUDA-based GPUs to dramatically accelerate the user´s workflow. Even the most complex scenes render interactively and in real-time. Bunkspeed also enables users to scale up rendering over multiple machines. A new level of performance and realism is now achievable at less than 20% of the cost of the same level on multiple CPUs. "As a user of the previous generation software from Bunkspeed, I knew the standard set at the time was tough to beat. Bunkspeed SHOT offers breakthrough usability, performance and quality, and is a pleasure to use…. I am rendering at speeds unimagined just a couple of years ago…." - Peter Crowther, UK-based, computer graphic artist and illustrator | |
| – For more info, see www.bunkspeed.com/SHOT and www.mentalimages.com/iray – See VizWorld article: http://www.vizworld.com/2010/06/bunkspeed-shot-3d-photorealistic-rendering-simplified/ |
Hochschule Darmstadt Germany joins Bunkspeed's University Lab Program with a 30 seat lab license of Bunkspeed Move.
Joao graduated in industrial design from the College of Fine Arts in Sao Paulo. He now works as a virtual designer in the Fiat Latin America style center, the only Fiat design studio outside of Italy. Joao is responsible for photo realistic renders and virtual presentations during the development of the car and after, for use in advertising and other means of dissemination. He's always been passionate about the manufacturing process, from idea to sale. He began his career as an Alias modeler, but always liked to model products, render cars, and creation of boards emotionally oriented to advertising. Also in his spare time he likes to create concepts inspired by the work of Daniel Simons, Syd Mead and other concept designers.
Bunkspeed is proud to debut the much anticipated, all new, Bunkspeed Shot at the Northeast District Conference CoCreate, April 16-17, 2010 Kean University, Union, NJ. Our previous software HyperShot, was introduced to the industrial design community through the IDSA conferences across America starting back in 2008 so we chose the IDSA to debut again! We are excited to unveil many man years of dedicated software development in our new generation product for creative professionals. At the show we will also be showing Bunskpeed Move - The animation and rendering tool for designers. Move is in its second release, is production ready, and enables designer story telling like never before. 
ayed from the November 12th's Webinar, Bunkspeed Product Manager takes you through animation of a watch mechanism, camera fly's and material animation. An informative and useful tutorial on all HyperMove's animation elements. A must see for creation of animation in HyperMove.
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 MacLater this week, I'm going to give you a sneak peak into what's coming up in the next release, so stay tuned.
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.
U.S. Commerce Association’s Award Plaque Honors the Achievement
WASHINGTON D.C., June 8, 2009 -- Bunkspeed has been selected for the 2009 Los Angeles Award in the Computer Graphics Service category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).
The USCA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.
Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2009 USCA Award Program focused on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.
About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)
U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a Washington D.C. based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USCA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.
The USCA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.
SOURCE: U.S. Commerce Association
Cobra S2 Mens Drive - Click on "360 View"
