Computer Graphics World

R endering, yes, rendering, is the hot topic of 2009. It's possible you have been following CAD and engineering long enough to remember that rendering pro- grams were offered as an essential add-on more than 20 years ago. You probably also know that the rendering capabilities within most CAD programs have improved con- siderably. So, why is rendering a hot-button issue now? Again? In a way, the reason is the same now as it was then: because you can. Rendering is the first love of many graphics doctoral students, and every year, universities crank out new, brilliant PhDs with new, brilliant approaches to rendering. In the past five years, the emphasis has been on shader technology, which the OpenGL and Mi- crosoft DirectX APIs made available to hardware processors. In this new golden age, rendering is jet-fueled with hardware acceleration and rendering algorithms that are better than ever. e broad availability of 64-bit processors with 64-bit operating systems means that ever-cheaper systems can handle ever-higher amounts of data. Raytracing, the process of calculating the path of light to create photoreal effects, has re-emerged as a practical application for computer graphics now that powerful, new multiprocessor systems have arrived to go to work on the problem. Also, those talented doctoral candidates have devised clever compression algorithms. Given all that, it's not surprising that there are several contend- ers jockeying for position in the rendering sweepstakes, and there are plenty of inter- ested, materially interested, onlookers. The Players Among the companies that are lining up excitedly to gain approval in the CAD world are Bunkspeed, Onesia, StudioGPU, ArtVPS, Autodesk (with Showcase), Re- altime Technology (RTT), and Luxology. Longtime major-league player Mental Im- ages is redoubling its efforts in the CAD market, and even Pixar has revamped the venerable RenderMan—a product that's been doing its job for more than 20 years in the movie industry—to take advantage of multiple processors and 64-bit technology. What's interesting is that companies with rendering technology are taking different August 2009 24 n n n n Rendering Rendering is new again, thanks to significant advances by a number of vendors. Here, David Burgess illustrates the power of Bunkspeed's HyperShot for this Ford Taurus image on behalf of Ford Motor Co.

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