SIG: Lightwork Design unveils Iray+ and partners with Nvidia

At SIGGRAPH 2013 this week Lightwork Design, the world’s leading rendering technology company providing photographic realism in the form of API (application programming interfaces) for CAD and 3D software developers, today announced it has formed a partnership with graphics hardware giant Nvidia Corporation, to bring Iray+ to the market.

Iray+ is a GPU-based ray-tracing rendering SDK (software development kit) and incorporates Nvidia’s iray technology. Iray+ is an unbiased rendering technology with infinite performance scalability.

Iray+ Technical Details

Iray+ is a new rendering solution option from Lightwork Design that builds upon Nvidia’s Iray technology. This is a marriage between a leading software rendering API company and a leading hardware rendering technology, bringing their respective strengths together for a new option within the market. Key details include:

• Physically accurate photorealistic rendering and previewing technology
• Unbiased highly accurate renderer providing visualization suitable for support of simulation tasks
• Complex layered materials including sub-surface scattering and caustic effects
• Fast previewing modes provided with consistent material and lighting representation
• Scales to local and cloud based cluster installations for collaboration, batch rendering, animation, online configuration workflows and real-time GI interactive solutions
• User interface components for rapid integration
• Runs on CPUs, with unprecedented performance and scalability on Nvidia GPUs

Dave Forrester, CEO of Lightwork Design commented: “Our new product launch, and relationship with Nvidia, uniquely positions us to bring the power of Iray in an easy to use format to 3D designers and engineers. I feel this is a pairing set to shake up visualization in the CAD industry, with Nvidia’s exceptional Iray rendering technology combined with Lightworks industry leading expertise in bringing high end visualization to the masses.”

01 The new Iray+ product is a new GPU ray-tracing rendering SDK from Lightworks based on Nvidia’s iray technology. (image courtesy Lightworks)

Bob Mayer, COO of IMSI/Design and a longtime customer of Lightworks’ products added: “The introduction of the Iray+ technology alongside the existing Lightworks’ products is an exciting development that will provide additional visualization technology to our users; we’re looking forward to seeing what products Lightworks developers with this new GPU-focused ray-tracing technology.”

“We are very pleased to be working closely with Lightworks to greatly broaden Iray adoption,” said Phillip Miller, director of NVIDIA Advanced Rendering. “Lightworks has a superb reputation for servicing companies and products of all sizes and types, and we’re confident their Iray+ solution will make Iray all the easier for products to adopt and for people to use.”

Lightworks is extremely excited to announce this new relationship with NVIDIA and are looking forward to working together to bring Iray+ to the design industries. Lightworks will be announcing and exhibiting Iray+ technology alongside NVIDIA, at SIGGRAPH, ‘The 40th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques’, held in Anaheim from 23-25 July 2013. Those who are attending please visit Stand 154 to see Iray+ in action and discuss this exciting new chapter for Lightworks with a member of their team.

 Architosh Analysis

This is a very exciting announcement from the folks at Lightworks and no doubt will be well received by the larger industry. Lightwork Design is the world’s leading supplier of rendering toolkits (SKD/API technology) used in CAD and 3D software applications used worldwide. Many of these leading tools have been starting to tap the power of other rival rendering solutions, from rivals such as Luxion, Next Limit and Luxology and others. In particular GPU accelerated ray tracing has become very important for numerous workflows that require iterative processes that demand photorealism.

With Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro being based around AMD’s GPUs it remains to be seen how this new Lightworks Iray+ SDK will work on that hardware. Nvidia’s iray technology is, from what we understand, strictly CUDA based. We do not know at this time if an OpenCL based version from Nvidia will emerge. Nvidia’s iray technology was previously incorporated into to Autodesk 3dx Max, Dassault Systemes’ CATIA v6 and somewhat of particular note in Bunkspeed’s SHOT application after the split with Luxion’s creator. Additionally, m4d is a standalone plugin for Maxon’s CINEMA 4D that brings mental ray and iray to this leading 3D software package.