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Bunkspeed HyperShot (User Review)

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 click-and-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 higher and higher resolutions. If you let it go just a few seconds more, you really get the clean and crisp photorealism that you'd expect from a final rendering, not a preview.

Figure 1. Putting some glamour in your product is easy and impressive with HyperShot. The rubber on the knobs and plastic finishes used here come standard.

So right away, I've got a model in the 3D scene that I can use, and I can immediately add or change materials to my surfaces to see how it's going to look within a few seconds. What I think most people like about HyperShot is this instant gratification. Everything about HyperShot emphasizes a faster timeline for the designer — the program's loading time, the rendering process time, and the ability to make quick modifications to the 3D composition.

As for model setup for HyperShot, there's not a lot of difference from the conventional renderers out there. One thing I had to learn was to change the groupings of surfaces in Rhino to correspond to the materials, not how they might be grouped during the building of the model. If I apply a material in HyperShot, it colors every item in the group. But this adjustment is rather easy to do after you've figured it out.

When you begin rendering within this 3D environment, it's also possible to tweak the lighting, rescale or reposition the model, or change the camera vantage point. Again, the scene will re-render automatically after each adjustment. It makes the overall composition of any scene much easier for designers to achieve than using some of the other popular rendering tools.

Bunkspeed HyperShot

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