Picture perfect: Leading-edge rendering and visualization for product design
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Presentation-quality renderings play a crucial role in the product development process. Realistic, photograph-quality renderings are especially important for consumer products, where visualizations in real-world settings are used to sell a concept or an idea to the customer or to a company's development team. It ultimately allows for organizations to make better decisions from the digital model, thus significantly reducing the need for physical prototypes.
Until recently, high-quality rendering was a specialty application requiring expertise beyond that of the typical product designer. While many CAD solutions have included rendering capabilities for quite some time, the procedures for defining environments, light sources and intensities, and other key rendering inputs could be a tedious and lengthy trial-and-error process. The production of appealing, photorealistic images was typically the domain of experts using tools outside the CAD system.
A new technology called Image-Based Lighting (IBL) is bringing ultra-realistic visualization into the mainstream of product design. Using an advanced image format called High Dynamic Range Imaging, image-based lighting dramatically reduces the time and effort required to produce images with stunningly realistic lighting effects. This technology originated and is broadly used in the entertainment industry for the creation of computer graphics special effects.
High Dynamic Range Images (HDRIs) contain much more illumination information than conventional image formats, in effect capturing all the real-world lighting information in a scene - from both natural and artificial sources. Image-based lighting uses the information in the HDRI to illuminate CAD models for the rendering process. With HDRIs, image-based lighting eliminates all the setup of environments, light sources, and intensities typically required for photorealistic renderings - the user simply orients the model and the image.
Image-based lighting using HDRIs has been incorporated in the latest release of NX™ software, UGS' premier CAD/CAM/CAE solution for digital product development. Included at no additional cost to customers of NX rendering and visualization tools, image-based lighting can reduce the rendering and visualization process time from hours to minutes. Because of the speed and simplicity, product designers can now produce photographic-quality visualizations in a matter of minutes instead of hours - within the same system they use to model the product.
With the image-based lighting in NX, UGS is also delivering sample HDRIs that can be used for immediate productivity. These images, captured exclusively for UGS customers, include a variety of photographic studio scenes with professional lighting setups, as well as an outdoor beach scene. With the next interim release, NX 4.0.1, the HDRIs will be included on the software media. In the meantime they are available for customer download from the Global Technical Access Center (GTAC) customer web site.
