Shortly after arriving, the reception started in the Frank Lloyd Wright ballroom. The crowd was pretty thin for the most part, but I do not believe that everyone has arrived yet. There was a fairly significant showing of vendors including: Bunkspeed, Wacom, Autodesk, and Savannah College of Art and Design. I had a chance to get a great software demo from both Bunkspeed and Wacom.
Bunkspeed was showing off some of their CPU based rendering packages, Hypershot, as well as their GPU based Hyperdrive. They were pretty impressive, but lacked some of the realistic qualities. The software and rendering, though, was extremely fast. This might be a useful tool for design visualization that is used internally, but I wouldn’t consider it the most realistic. Hyperdrive, which is the more powerful version, is a lot more configurable and is reminsicent of Maxwell (scaled down). The feature set was strong and had a good blend from other software packages.
Wacom was displaying and demoing their Cintiq series of tablets. They are absolutely wonderful to sketch on and have a price tag to reflect that. It would be nice to be able to consolidate sketching tools and external monitor into one product, but I’m not sure if $2000 is justifiable for one unit. Although, matched up with Autodesk’s Sketch Book Pro would be ideal.
