hyperShot: Near Realtime Rendering System for Windows and Mac

Rendering can to be honest be a bit of a pain, there are often so many options to tweak and settings to be aware of that getting the correct lighting or look to a model can be enormously frustrating.

Even when you have the correct settings rendering times can run from a few minutes to a few hours for city and geographic models. As such we were intrigued with the 14 day demo of hyperShot by Bunkspeed. HyperShot is a software renderer, that allows anyone within minutes, to create photographic realism with their model. As their site info states - think of it like a new type of camera, an all software camera. Import all the popular model formats, drag and drop accurate materials, choose your environment and you have a photo of your digital model.

The interface takes a little getting used to, oddly enough because it is so easy to use and with so few options to tweak. You can simply load up a model, the software supports Obj, FBX, Collada, Autodesk 3D Studio Max (3DS), Rhino 4.0 and prior and SketchUp 7.0 and prior on the Mac (our test platform) set a HDR environmental map and then render.


The image above is a geographic model out of ESRI ArcScene, every other software package we have tried to render it in has crashed with 'out of memory' messages, hyperShot rendered it in 3 minutes.

Its a similar story with the image above, rendered within a HDR environment in a couple of minutes. This allows us to get on with the work flow rather than worrying about 'photons, final gathers' etc etc that are far too common in 3D packages.

Of note also is the ability to render from SketchUp via .skp or .dae files and it handles SketchUp files rather well. Below is a render of our SketchUp model of Fitzrovia Square, London:

The only option we would like to see is the ability to render out animations and fly throughs of the models, that would make hyperShot a must buy.

You can find out more and download a 14 day demo for both Windows and Mac operating systems via http://www.bunkspeed.com/

3D London Tube Map Movie

*Update - see 3D Tube Map Update for the latest movie - Update*


London Tube Map Geography:Visualisation Draft from digitalurban on Vimeo.

The movie above is a draft look at our 3D London Tube Map with the lines laid out according to their geographic location. The movie was made as a test to explore mental ray settings in 3ds Max, total render time was 36 hours.

Below is the actual tube map, again visualised via 3ds Max:


London Tube Map Traditional Layout from digitalurban on Vimeo.

For those interested see our 3D Tube Map thread for more images.

Free 'City Roads Package' Download for 3D Max

Our Greeble City Tutorial provides a walk through on how to quickly and easily create a cityscape, complete with custom skyscrapers. Creating a city is all well and good but it is the fine details that brings a 3D city to life, the first of these is the road network.

Creating a road network in 3D Max is to be honest a tedious process but once they are in place complete with pavements (sidewalks) a basic render can begin to look more city like.


The renders here are from our 'City Roads Package' which is now available as a free download for 3ds MAX, courtesy of us here at digital urban. Complete with 38 high resolution textures the pack includes a series of objects that will snap together to create a grid or path layout.

Note as a temporary measure the file has been removed due to issues with the textures, we are working hard to resolve this and a new updated file will go online as soon as possible. For the time being a non texture mapped version is available here (.zip file) - it should still be of use as the roads can be snapped togehter to quickly make a city layout for use in our Greeble City tutorial.



If you do use the package we would love to include a render on the blog so do let us know.

Road Networks: Bringing 3D Greeble Cities to Life

Our Greeble City Tutorial provides a walk through on how to quickly and easily create a cityscape, complete with custom skyscrapers. Creating a city is all well and good but it is the fine details that brings a 3D city to life, the first of these is the road network.

Creating a road network in 3D Max is to be honest a tedious process but once they are in place complete with pavements (sidewalks) a basic render can begin to look more city like.

The three renders here are from our 'City Road Pack' which we will be uploading to TurboSquid or some other file sharing site free of charge. This should save anyone wanting to build a quick city having to go through the two day process of making roads. The pack will include a series of objects that will snap together to create a grid or path layout.

Soon as its ready to go we will put up a post, in the meantime if there are any other parts of cities that people would like to see let us know via the comment box.

We should also have a post on roads and agent based traffic simulation in Crysis later this week as well, the main Crysis tutorial has been delayed due to a 'shadow bug' in the latest build. Soon as this is fixed we will put the SketchUp/3D Max to Crysis tutorial online.