Bunkspeed Hypershot

‘Are you like me, a Photoworks goofy foot? Looking for an intuitive alternative? I can never get anything really intentionally attractive out of Photoworks. Maxwell render seemed like an alternative early on, but it turns out to be slow and the interface is probably as confusing as Photoworks. Bunkspeed Hypershot has been getting some press recently, so I figured I’d try it out.

The first thing I notice about Hypershot is that they confront the “ok, so how do you use this stuff” question right up front with a 6 step process that is well laid out and easy to follow. Hypershot is compatible with SolidWorks and can read SW files directly, but the current version does not read SolidWorks 2008 files. Of course, most of my cool new models are in 2008 format.\n\nThe interface is not too complex:

My model came in originally sticking straight up in the air with the back bumper on the ground. I had to pause and read the instructions for 20 seconds to figure this out. Damn ADD. Anyway, they provide a way to rotate the model, but they make you guess about which way is up. It asks you to rotate by axis, but doesn’t show the axes. Or maybe that was in the instructions too. Of course being a SW user, I wanted to rotate the background, but they assume that the world is fixed and your object is movable.

Fortunately, there is a Snap To Ground button in the Move interface so I didn’t have to guess about dimensions and directions, like you do in Photoworks.

Materials are relatively easy to assign, particularly if you have already assigned colors to your SolidWorks model. Hypershot just assigns the same material to faces of the same color. This was only a problem in one case when I wanted to assign a different material to the grill than the wheel wells, and they were both black in SolidWorks. You can double click to tweak specific properties of the materials, but the names of the properties are all very cryptic. No less cryptic than the meaningless icons used in Photoworks, I suppose.

Once the materials are applied, the preview looks pretty good:

The rendering was surprisingly easy, and I think a good bit faster than Photoworks with equivalent settings. I had difficulty with the headlight glass, but the rest of the materials were surprisingly easy to set up. My main impression of this software is that it is far easier to get good results than in Photoworks, especially when integrating the rendered part into the environment. I notice that people tend not to try that with Photoworks, but with Hypershot, it’s just part of the process.

The finished rendering looks pretty good by my standards:

Of course I noticed too late that there is a reflection in the sand. Don’t see that too frequently.

And another one:

And one final one:

One thing they could definitely improve on is the licensing of their trial version. Most people using a trial version have an attention span of about 15 seconds, and if it doesn’t work immediately, screw it, cheap software, litigious bastards, etc. etc. It creates a text file which you must mail in and wait for a license file. How 20th century. Fortunately, it works quickly even if you work outside of normal working hours.

Photoworks keeps improving, but the SW people are too smart for their own good. They find it impossible to make something reliable, simple, powerful and flexible. The interface is a constant moving target, and functionality gets added and removed without notice, so I never make any headway learning the software from one release to the next. Granted, the PW interface is far more polished looking than HS, but it’s the difference between polishing a Yugo and polishing a Lotus.

The one big downside to using Hypershot is that if you want to make geometry changes, you have to do that in SolidWorks and reimport, and then reassign materials. Import through STEP was painless.

The Hypershot forum has a lot of nice work represented on it. Some very nice stuff from automotive industry pros. There I learned that Hypershot for Mac is limited to only importing OBJ files. There must be a reason why even the artistic technology companies have limited support for Mac.

Anyway, a big thumbs up for Hypershot. Easy to use, easy to get good results. Easy to integrate the rendering into the background. Still some little things missing, like light sources in the scene, decals, and a few interface niceties. Results win, hands down. The Photoworks interface is far more developed, but somehow it just doesn’t produce results like this, at least not for me.

The cost? There is a low res version for $200 and the HD version for $1000. If I did a lot of rendering, say a render or two a week, the $1000 would be easy to justify, but I don’t. I do one a month, and often thats for my own entertainment.