I've been following Bunkspeed's Hypershot for some time now. It's a very easy to use photoreal renderer, but a bit pricey for what you get. It turns out Bunkspeed ran into some licensing issues, and the HyperShot developers started their own new company, KeyShot. Meanwhile, Bunkspeed licensed another third party renderer and teamed up with NVidia to create their new product called "Shot."
HyperShot, KeyShot and Shot all tout super fast rendering speeds with photoreal results as their most significant feature. Here's a video which shows Shot in action:
Recently, I downloaded a trial copy of Shot to put it through it's paces. I don't have a fancy NVidia setup so I have to use the CPU only rendering mode. That said, it did seem to perform rather fast and I was able to crank out this basic quality level rendering in just 90 seconds. Here's a sample:
So, off I went to Vue to try and figure out how it would fare competing with Shot. Here's the render I created. It was rendered using Superior mode and completed in only 51 seconds.
There are differences for sure. The Mental Ray renderer of Shot seems to do a bit better on some of the light dispersion, but it also took twice as long and still has noise artifacts. Also, it really isn't an apples to apples comparison as Shot uses HDRI lighting while the Vue render uses my lighting rig from a previous post. I was able to use Shot's HDRI's inside of Vue, but they didn't work on this scene very well. This is because Shot has the concept of a "plate" which is sort of a seamless background / foreground and doesn't show the horizon line. The Vue render outside the rig using the same HDRI just didn't work. This is a feature I'm hoping Vue will one day have.
Also, I was able to do a number of smaller renders matching the Shot website with DOF and they took between 30 seconds and a minute on Final setting, which surprised me. They even had blurred reflections. Here they are:
So, what does this all mean? Well, it appears to me while Shot has a really cool 'rez-in' render feature, it's not really any faster than Vue. Of course one may say the quality of the Mental Ray renderer is superior, but I believe I can achieve some pretty good results in Vue, as evidenced above. I'll keep playing around and see where it takes me.
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