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For one designer, real-time rendering is a dream come true.
The buzz around Bunkspeed's rendering software, HyperShot, had leaked into my office. I decided I wanted to take a week or two to test the free trial and see if the claims were true: final rendered scenes in real time and amazingly easy-to-achieve photorealism. HyperShot is a tool for all types of designers, from architects to artists and animators to aerospace engineers and jewelry makers, but I was curious to find out how HyperShot might fit into my own work as an industrial designer.
This review might propagate the buzz, because I found that - with a few small reservations - I must confirm the rumors. And I discovered other advantages unique to HyperShot that make simple sense for product designers.
Instant Gratification
The rendering application is available as a stand-alone product for both PC and Mac platforms. I'm an industrial designer and work in Rhinoceros, the NURBS modeling solution from McNeel. So I tested Bunkspeed with its Rhino plug-in, which was a beta version at the time.
To give you some background, typically I use a different add-on rendering engine for Rhino. I build in all my rendering materials and apply them in series: The process is clickand-apply, click-and-apply, click-and-apply, then finally click to render. The rendering application pops up, and it starts rendering. The renders can take from 2 minutes for a simple rendering to as long as 4 hours for a really complicated one. My day-to-day work - which isn't supercomplex - takes 20 minutes on average to render.
With HyperShot, the plug-in interface would be familiar to most 3D users, but there is already a major difference right at the outset. My model loads into a lighting scene first. I still apply my materials one-by-one, but in HyperShot, I get to see the 3D scene change with each step along the way. In just a couple seconds, the material appears on the model in that environment, including all the final shadows, highlights, and reflections (figure 1). HyperShot continually renders into...