Over at SolidSmack, they’ve got a great review of Luxion’s new KeyShot2.0.  They open with a quick cliff-notes on the history (the Luxion/BunkSpeed drama) and quickly transition into the new features of KeyShot2.

If you were a Hypershot user, you know how easy it was to create a quick rendering. KeyShot blows that away and not only makes getting a rendering easier, but also makes the workflow to get that rendering easier. You have three areas where you do the majority of your work. The Realtime window, the Library and the Options. You size the model in the Realtime window, drag and drop materials and environments from the Library and adjust your light setting and material in the Options. The settings in both are split into tabs so you don’t have boxes littering your workspace. It makes for a set-up you can jump around in smoothly without going mad wondering what to do next.

I had a chance to see it demonstrated in the Intel booth at SIGGRAPH, and for a pure-CPU renderer it’s pretty impressive.  Of course, they had it running on a 24-core machine, so obviously it’s going to be fast, but I was glad to see this in his review, which they left out of their SIGGRAPH presentation:

Part of the disagreement that divided Luxion and Bunkspeed, is what processors should be used to create the renderings. Bunkspeed maintained that utilizing the GPU was the way to go, while Luxion maintained the CPU was more capable. True, you can usually get more CPU power for the money, but there are realtime benefits and power the GPU also provides. So, this will change with KeyShot 2.1 where support for additional GPU rendering is added.

This is the true direction of this argument: Merging the CPU & GPU into hybrid solutions, exploiting the power of both sides to their fullest.

via KeyShot 2.0. All the Raw, Realtime Render Juice You Can Squeeze [Review] >> SolidSmack.com.

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