Westland Helicopter’s search for more advanced rendering tools initially began as a quest to speed up processing times. In the past, as much as 60 percent of the company’s imaging time was devoted to rendering. According to Gary Weller, 3D modeling and animation specialist, not only has the company reduced rendering time with the PURE system, image quality has also improved.

“We’ve found that the benefit of better image quality using the PURE system is even more important than the speed factor,” says Weller. “Our customers are asking for photorealistic images that a standard software renderer can’t produce. But with the PURE card I can produce high-quality, realistic images for our salesmen to use in presentations.”

The PURE PCI card enables 3D rendering to be split across an array of eight specialized ray-tracing chips. It can handle realistic effects that are traditionally expensive and time-consuming to calculate, including multiple area lights, accurate motion blur and depth of field, secondary illumination, and physically based materials, lighting and camera properties.

A plug-in called RenderPipe provides control of the PURE card within the 3ds max, VIZ or Maya graphical user interface. RenderPipe supports standard materials of the 3D application, as well as RenderMan shaders. It comes with ART VPS’s physically based RenderCoat materials, which are tuned to take advantage of PURE's accelerated ray-tracing architecture.

“It can be quite tricky to get a realistic look for the finishes on things like furniture for the VIP interiors of our helicopters,” says Weller. “The PURE system has given us a leap forward in making the images much more realistic. The quality of ray-trace reflections on things like woodwork, metals and mirrors in the interiors of these VIP helicopters is now far superior than anything we could do in the past.”