Some of the many new features include:

Multi-Layer Materials (Pro and Drive Suites)

Materials can be layered so you can have a “glass layer” on top of “carbon fiber”, or a “dirt” texture map on top of car paint, for example. Materials can be stacked with up to four layers, creating sophisticated and complex material renditions with ease.

Multilayer Material - Rusty Metal

Multilayer Material - Muddy Paint

Auto-Update of Backplates, and High Dynamic Range Images Edited in Any Open Application (Shot, Move, Pro and Drive Suites)

Auto-Update monitors a file for changes on the file system. For example, if you are editing a backplate in Photoshop, when you save a change to the backplate, we detect the change and automatically update the file in Bunkspeed software. This creates an interactive workflow for rapid update and iteration of in-session edits. Common workflows include lighting creation and HDR enhancement in HDR Light Studio, backplate painting in Photoshop, or texture creation in Filter Forge.

Auto Update with HDR Light Studio

Region Render (Pro and Drive Suites)

Choose a subset, or “region”, of your image to render. Region rendering is camera-specific, so various regions can be specified on multiple cameras. Region rendering is a key professional-level workflow and productivity enhancement.

Camera Based Region Rendering

Multiple Working Viewports (Pro and Drive Suites)

Now you can have up to four viewports visible simultaneously, with each viewport referencing a separate definable camera, model set or environment. This is excellent for presentations, showing multiple variations simultaneously or even working on animation set up where the animated camera can be viewed in one viewport and the animation ribbon can be adjusted in another.

Multiple Viewports - Quad Ortho	Multiple Viewports - Four Grid
Multiple Viewport - Dual Horizontal

Full Screen Mode (Shot, Move, Pro and Drive Suites)

The application window can now be full screen and borderless for a clean appearance during important design review presentations or daily use.

Fullscreen Presentation Mode

Baked Lighting (Drive Suite)

For high quality real-time presentations, baked lighting is extremely useful. Baked lighting dramatically improves the quality and believability of models during rasterized rendering, giving “near” raytrace quality with super fast and completely noise free interactivity.

Baked Lighting Clay

Baked Lighting Painted

Network Rendering – Bunkspeed PowerBoost – Major improvements (Pro and Drive Suites)

We made significant workflow, stability and functionality improvements in network rendering. The network rendering Queue is now a production verified tool that many of our customers can’t live without. Queue and PowerBoost are significant productivity enhancing tools for offloading large renderings and animation jobs to either a local or remote cluster.

New Pro/E and CREO Plugin (Shot, Move, Pro and Drive Suites)

We re-introduced direct support for Pro/E and CREO user via a plugin. Quickly model, adjust, then push your design into any Bunkspeed product to see it in photographic perfection.

You can read more about the many fixes and other improvements here in the release notes.

Pricing and Availability

The 2012.4 release of Bunkspeed software integrated with Nvidia iray 2 rendering technology will be available today for download at www.bunkspeed.com. Pricing starts at $495 for SHOT, $1,495 for MOVE and $3,495 for PRO.

About Bunkspeed

Bunkspeed is a leading global provider of visualization software and services for design, engineering, and marketing. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, our advanced visualization technologies leverage digital engineering assets and contribute to enlightened decision-making in the digital design process. Our clients gain a cost effective way to deliver sales and marketing imagery, and realize significantly reduced product development costs. Bunkspeed’s customers include Nissan, Ford Motor Company, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, Pininfarina, Chrysler, Frog Design, Smart Design, IDEO, Acushnet Company, Dell, Gillette, Gulfstream and many others.

For more information on Bunkspeed’s products and services, please visit: www.bunkspeed.com.

We asked them a few questions about their workflow so that the rest of the world can peer into their magic.

About this Project:

The Slimplus seat is a modular aircraft seat designed to provide a more pleasant flying experience for the passenger and a more versatile and efficient seat program for the manufacturer. For the passenger, the seat provides comfort, enhanced ergonomic features and appealing aesthetics. For the manufacturer, the seat meets stringent space, weight, cost, manufacturing and serviceability requirements.

3D visualization of the product was vital in the decision making process. Having the ability to visualize multiple design directions quickly and photo-realistically was invaluable for us. Animating a short clip of the Slimplus helped tremendously in marketing the product. Bunkspeed was instrumental in visualizing our ideas throughout the design process and even into production and marketing.

What is one aspect of the Slimplus project that you love?

A big part of our design focus was the modularity aspect of the seat system. With dozens of options and hundreds of cross-combinations, it was difficult to come up with an elegant solution to accommodate all of the possibilities. In the end, we designed a shroud system that can be easily removed from the frame. This innovation accounts for engineering demands and opens up possibilities for beautiful aesthetics. Bunkspeed was a vital tool for us to communicate these ideas to our clients. Visualizing the hundreds of iterations was made easy by their direct and intuitive UI. We used their configuration tool to its utmost during these phases.

What is one aspect of the pro suite that you love?

Bunkspeed Pro Suite is a powerful renderer with an emphasis on user experience. The guys at Bunkspeed have put a lot of focus on the GUI and how it relates to a broad range of workflow from different industries. Setting up a scene in the Pro Suite has never been easier; and they are continuing to improve. The iRay 2 render engine produces amazingly accurate lighting calculations; which leads to photo-realistic results. Bunkspeed Pro Suite is powerful enough to render complicated scenes without a lot of work-arounds; yet it is intuitive enough to allow people with little rendering experience to set up.

Were you able to accomplish anything that just simply couldn’t be done before?

Bunkspeed was one of the earliest companies to utilize a GPU-capable rendering engine. With this new technology, ID Group was able to render at incredible speeds; so we can now render out animations cost-efficiently. This certainly opened new marketing / design opportunities for us and for our clients.

Could you think of a cost and time savings that were introduced by using our solutions?

If we compare CPU to GPU rendering solutions based on performance and cost, there is no argument that GPU-based renderers are more cost-efficient. For the same investment, we can gain a lot more rendering performance with GPU-based renderers vs the old school CPU-based renderers. With such a jump in rendering speeds, rendering time is no longer the bottleneck in our workflow for most projects.

What was your client’s reaction to this project?

Our clients love the quality of our renderings. Sometimes they mistake it for a photograph; they sometimes even prefer our renderings over photographs. In addition, they were very impressed with the animated sequences.

We’re excited to release 2012.3 version of Bunkspeed SHOT, MOVE, PRO and DRIVE. This release has many new features, improvements and fixes. Wev’e especially focused on adding more file formats to the import pipeline, and improving that process significantly. There are also many small improvements in overall performance and stability plus an all new automatic update system which will mean more frequent, and easier deployment of updates. This is an update definitely worth having.  We expect an overall better first experience, and a system that will ensure you have the most solid release all the time. If you’re new to Bunkspeed, the download process is now just a single click and the software will download, install and launch ready to go. We’re keenly focused on making the 3D rendering process faster and, the best user experience possible, so please keep bringing your suggestions through posts to our forum here:  http://forum.bunkspeed.com/forum.php.

Here’s a list of what’s new and additional improvements:

Check out this example revealed today for Lotus’s LMP2 World Endurance Championship programme. Now officially with a livery by Designer Daniel Simon, celebrating the Black and Gold theme of magical motor racing eras, Lotus looks to make quite the statement during this years Le Mans circuit.

Daniel Simon Livery Lotus Le Mans LMP 2

You can find more about Daniel Simon here, and more about Lotus’s plans here.

Don’t forget to “like” Daniel on Facebook to receive updates on his amazing work.

Blue Sky CGI workflow example

With CGI being used more widely than ever throughout product marketing, Blue Sky CGI have discovered a way to stand out. The addition of Bunkspeed Pro Suite to their tool box, along with their expertise are helping them stay ahead of the game.

Blue Sky CGI were courteous enough to let us in on exactly how they do this.

Imagine that a global ad agency needs to create a series of images for Ford Ranger. The location in mind is in Thailand. Due to the remote locations and unpredictability of the weather CG is clearly the way to go.

In the studio CAD data used to generate 3D-models of the car was being prepared for realistic shading and material mapping. At the same time the photographic team is off to Thailand. On the team – the art director, photographer, CG operator, producer, prop stylists and assistants. As the photographic team shoots backplates and matching HDRI lightdomes, the source is sent back to the studio where its is prepped and set up in the CG environment. The photographer and art director then work with the CG operator to set the camera and lighting. This can be done back in the studio or directed remotely. Next comes the high resolution rendering which gives the product proper lighting, reflections, and any masks the retoucher might require. Lastly the image is composited into the background and final retouching takes place.

Directors at Blue Sky CGI, Rick Chou and Lee Waters concur: “As modern equipment and software continue to improve, one major difference between how photography worked in the old days versus modern advertising is the exposure to digital capability and visualization…”

“Security issues are easier to control. The large cost of prototypes is eliminated. Earlier production starts are possible and realistic visualizations of the final product are viewable during the design phase. There are broader creative possibilities, less weather dependency, and it is easier to make changes updating the model year. Also the speed and ease of global communications has opened up the whole world as potential clients.”

Along with their clients (Audi, BMW, Buick, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, Lexus, Mercedes, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota – to name a few), Blue Sky CGI is currently producing projects for Ford’s use in Europe, for Roewe’s use in Asia, and images are being worked on for a yacht designer from Amsterdam.”

About Blue Sky CGI:

Blue Sky CGI is a Los Angeles based boutique studio offering high-end CGI rendering and creative retouching services to the automotive, transportation and advertising industries.  With a combination of talent, technical skills and deep experience, Blue Sky CGI has the unique ability to accommodate a broad range of advertising assignments from print to broadcast to mobile platforms.

To see more of their work and for more information, visit Blue Sky CGI at http://www.cgibluesky.com/.

Twister CGI Splash

Audi 1	Audi 2	Splash Metal
Splash 2	Lexus	Sculpture

Twister CGI produces some of the hottest magazine ready shots and we found a perfect example.

Photo of Magazine and Original Image

We hope you enjoy his work.

www.twisterimaging.com

David is a UK-based Industrial Designer with a passion for creating user-centered products with strong aesthetic identities and unique personalities. He graduated in 2008 from Bournemouth University’s School of Design, Engineering and Computing on the south coast of England after studying BA (Hons) Industrial Design. His university thesis project, the “Capsule Caravan”, went on to generate a great deal of attention, both in the UK and internationally, and was widely published in newspapers, magazines and design-centered blogs. Images of the design are on permanent collection at Germany’s Erwin Hymer Museum, a museum dedicated to the history and design of caravans.

David has worked as a freelancer and as a design consultant at product design consultancy Haughton Design in Staffordshire. While working for Haughton Design, he had the opportunity to work on projects across a variety of industries, including consumer medical, industrial, agricultural, and street furniture. David has used Bunkspeed’s products to help in creating realistic and striking imagery to demonstrate design concepts, create product marketing material, and to sell ideas to clients, investors, and manufacturers.

Here are a few examples of his work:

Congratulations David! We can’t wait to see what you create with Move.

The first set of tutorials include:

1. Setting Preferences
2. Interface Overview
3. Models Overview
4. Importing Models
5. Materials and Textures
6. Basics of Materials
7. Environments Overview
8. Environments HDRI Lighting
9. Cameras Overview
10. Camera Basics
11. Library Overview
12. Animation Overview
13. The Animation Ribbon
14. Rendering Overview

Car design is like a heady combination of art, high fashion, and engineering, requiring extreme degrees of creativity and aesthetic sensibility. Creative aesthetics are even more refined in the rarified world of concept car design, which explores the future form and function of automotive transport. Each year at the LA Auto Show in Los Angeles, design studios are invited to compete in a Design Challenge to create entire story lines based on and featuring extreme car designs.

For several years, the Advanced Design Center California, the North American research and development division of Mercedes-Benz, has competed in the LA Auto Show Design Challenge. This year, the Mercedes California studio added to its technology tools the NVIDIA® Maximus™ platform, transforming the studio’s workflow from a tedious, serial process to a parallel processing environment enabling multitasking with even the most compute-intensive steps.

“We always start with really ambitious ideas,” said Alan Barrington, the Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design Center California designer who, along with Jack Luttig, the vehicle’s designer, was given the responsibility of creating the animation. “Last year, we were forced to compromise, eliminating a lot of great features and dumbing things down because our computer technology wasn’t fast enough to perform the design and ray tracing we needed. This year was an entirely different story. The NVIDIA Maximus-powered system gave us the time to explore different options creatively, which shows in the quality of this year’s entry.”

CHALLENGE

For the Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design Center California, the LA Auto Show Design Challenge is a chance to flex creative muscles. But it’s far from an idle exercise in design for design’s sake. “This competition is an important forum for trying out new software and new design technologies that we can apply to the development of our production cars,” said Christopher Rhoades, chief designer of the Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design Center California. “Internally, it also demonstrates to Mercedes executive management in Germany the role and value of satellite design studios like ours.”

Previously, the design studio used a quad-core CPU. Their design workflow began in 2D, using either paper or Adobe Photoshop or Autodesk Alias software. From there, they used Alias for 3D modeling and either Alias or Autodesk Maya for visualization. “Visualization, actually ray tracing the surface of the car, was the most computer-intensive step,” said Barrington. “Photorealistic rendering– i.e., ray tracing–takes lots of calculations, and it could easily lock up the computer for a day. With hundreds of frames per visualization, and each frame taking 10 minutes to render, we needed hundreds of hours of rendering time each week.” The ray-tracing process completely monopolized the studio’s computing systems meaning they were unavailable for any other work while rendering. “Even trying to schedule rendering and visualization at night, often there was physically not enough time to get everything done,” said Barrington. “We had to make difficult choices about what couldn’t be ray-traced in the time available. As a result, for the 2010 competition we ran out of time to implement many of our concepts, which was frustrating.”

SOLUTION

The Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design Center California installed two NVIDIA Maximus systems on HP Z800 workstations. The NVIDIA Maximus platform brings together the industry-leading, professional 3D graphics capability of the ultra high-end NVIDIA Quadro® 6000 graphics processing unit (GPU) with the parallel-computing power of the new NVIDIA Tesla™ C2075 companion processor – enabling simultaneous 3D design, simulation, and visualization at the desktop.

On this system, the Mercedes –Benz designers run Autodesk 3ds Max, Bunkspeed Drive with NVIDIA iray®, Maya, Alias, Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects software. “With our Maximus-powered set-up, it’s like having a render farm with just two machines,” said Barrington.

“Now when we create a photorealistic animation, we can design a scene and send it off to render in the background in Bunkspeed with iray, then immediately start working on the next scene, which is ready to ray-trace when the previous one is done. Bunkspeed and Maximus work perfectly together to deliver the power and speed we need to get an instant feel for how the scene will look. That’s a huge help in getting the look we want, faster.”

The Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design Center California’s entry for the 2011 LA Auto Show Design Challenge, titled Silver Lightning, pays homage to 125 years of automotive innovation and design excellence. The animation for the competition features a story with two techno characters that have achieved a unique harmony between safety and style: the iconic MercedesBenz Silver Arrow racecar and the underappreciated crash test dummy. “The photorealistic animation is like a trailer for a movie, with high-impact, exciting scenes,” said Barrington. “We used the NVIDIA Maximus systems to model and ray trace the car and other characters not only for the animation, but also for a movie poster and stills we created. And in the opening scene of the trailer, where we were going for a lot of drama and where lighting was important, we were able to bring in a ray of sunlight that became a focal point of the scene. We literally could not have done this with our previous technology tools, because there was no way to design and render interactively, so not enough time to implement that kind of intricate lighting effect.”

IMPACT

“With the parallel processing capabilities enabled by the NVIDIA Maximus systems, we can now be 10 times more creative,” said Barrington. “In a given amount of time, we can explore so many different options and get to a better end product.”

The design studio also expects that these technology tools will be embraced by Mercedes-Benz’ engineers, who work with even larger data sets than the designers.

“Ray tracing and other compute-intensive processes no longer bring our workflow to a halt,” said Barrington. “While something is rendering on the NVIDIA Maximus system, we can continue doing 2D sketches, 3D modeling, and other tasks. We can stay productive not only on the animation for the competition, but also in our normal jobs.” Those “normal jobs” entail designing both concept and production cars for Mercedes-Benz – as well as selling design ideas to the company’s headquarters. “It’s important to provide talented designers with the right tools so they can express their abilities to the utmost,” said Rhoades. “NVIDIA Maximus technology enables us to do that, and it also makes it easier to communicate our new ideas and innovations to our German headquarters, to define our value as a satellite design studio.” In the end, that value rests on the studio’s creative abilities. “It’s the nature of our business that there are always changes,” said Barrington.“With the NVIDIA Maximus-powered environment, we can continue to refine and improve our design, right up to the last minute. We can stay efficient and multitask. We no longer have to settle for less or to compromise on our creativity.”
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All images courtesy of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, Inc.: Advanced Design Center California