Bunkspeed Delivers GPU Accelerated Animations with SHOT Pro

files/pictures/picture-3306.jpg

Press Release from Bunkspeed

Carlsbad, Calif. (Nov. 16, 2010)- Bunkspeed,a leading global provider of 3D rendering and animation software for the design and creative industry, announced today the release of Bunkspeed SHOT Pro, the professional version of Bunkspeed SHOT™, the world's first consistent, physically correct, hybrid, real-time creative 3D rendering solution that harnesses the power of both CPUs and GPUs. SHOT Pro continues our effort to provide the creative digital designer in product design, graphic arts, or architecture the ability to quickly explore various design concepts and communicate their intent with customers, partners, and internal stakeholders. Bunkspeed SHOT Pro adds functionality to enrich communication, accurately simulate the real world, streamline your workflow, and scale an end user's performance.

SHOT Pro enriches communication by introducing support for animation:

Turntable Animation: Quickly and easily create photorealistic animations showing your model (s) rotating 360 degrees providing a more immersive experience to your audience.
Sun Study Animation: Quickly and easily animate the rise and fall of sunlight over time.

“The addition of turntable and sun study animations brings Bunkspeed SHOT Pro to a whole new level enabling users to create gripping visuals.” says Philip Lunn, Bunkspeed founder and CEO. "We firmly believe that our photo-realistic 3D animations placed on the web will increase product awareness and drive demand. Our animations are simple and quick to create, and are a fraction of the cost of doing a photo shoot of the real product.

SHOT Pro adds functionality to automatically and accurately simulate the physical world so you don’t have to.

Displacement Mapping: Leverage a standard 2D grayscale image to add physical depth to an object.
Time of Day Lighting Model: Determine the impact of sunlight on your model by dictating the location and time for which the sun is to appear when lighting your scene.
32bit Image Output: Output final renders to 32bit HDR format with full before/after exposure control.

SHOT Pro introduces key features to streamline a user's workflow with real-time feedback and an intuitive interface.

Bunkspeed Queue™: Send and manage offline jobs to an organizable queue that can be started and ended at any time, providing flexibility in how you manage your own schedule.
Camera Positioning: Determine and share a virtual camera's position with a real world photographer to tightly match image backgrounds (backplates) with your digital models.
Real-time Camera Post processing: Add photographic effects to your image such as reticle, vignetting, exposure, white balance, saturation etc. giving you unprecedented flexibility in achieving that final look.
Rule of Thirds Overlay: This toggles a thirds or quarters on screen ruler to aid with composition

"Bunkspeed Queue will immediately improve productivity for our users", said David Randle, Bunkspeed Product Manager. "Now users can fire-off a series of animations during the off-hours, and when they arrive in the morning they can get back to creation versus tying up their systems for another set of high res images.

SHOT Pro scales performance by fully leveraging additional hardware over the network:

Bunkspeed Boost™: Connect Systems running SHOT Pro together with Boost™. Any copies of SHOT Pro installed on the same network can leverage each other’s available processing power when they are not under heavy load, providing a scalable on-demand solution.

"Hollywood gives me no time to wait. Bunkspeed Shot Pro on NVIDIA® CUDA-enabled GPU's is really fast. It leaves more time for me to be creative," said Daniel Simon, Cosmic Motors lead vehicle designer for feature films Tron Legacy, Captain American, and Battleship.

SHOT Pro is an "all-digital camera" with interactive ray-tracing and a simple and elegant workflow, empowering digital designers to bring their creations to life in minutes not hours. Unlike other typical or standard off-line 3D rendering software with hundreds of sliders, requiring endless tweaking and back/forth between the 3D setup and the resulting 2D image, Shot offers just the right amount of control allowing for total creative freedom while accurately simulating the physical world.

Pricing and Availability

Bunkspeed SHOT Pro™ integrated with iray® rendering technology leverages NVIDIA® Quadro® professional graphics solutions to enable a combination of unprecedented power, elegance and accuracy. Bunkspeed SHOT Pro is available starting at $3,500.

For more information about Bunkspeed SHOT Pro, please visit www.bunkspeed.com/SHOT [1]. For more information about mental images® and iray®, please visit www.mentalimages.com/iray [2]. For more information about NVIDIA QUADRO professional graphics solutions, please visit www.nvidia.com/quadro [3]. For more information on Cosmic Motors, please visit www.cosmic-motors.com [4].

About Bunkspeed

Bunkspeed is a leading global provider of 3D rendering and animation software for the design and creative industry. Bunkspeed is a private company founded in November of 2002 with the philosophy that 3D rendering software should be easy to learn, simple to use and produce stunning photographic results. Headquartered in Carlsbad, California, Bunkspeed's products include Bunkspeed SHOT, a "virtual digital camera" with interactive ray-tracing empowering anyone to quickly create photographic-quality images, Bunkspeed MOVE™, a "virtual movie camera" bringing products to life by quickly creating various types of animations, and Bunkspeed DRIVE™, a fully featured visualization application tuned for the automotive industry. Bunkspeed’s customers include Frog Design, Pininfarina, Unilever, Rubbermaid, Nike, Ford Motor Company, BMW, Honda, and Tiffany's. For more information on Bunkspeed’s products and services, visit www.bunkspeed.com [5].