Saddington & Baynes Purchases Four RenderDrives for 3D Automotive Rendering

CAMBRIDGE, UK--March 8, 2005--London-based Saddington & Baynes, a leading digital post-production studio, has purchased four ART VPS RenderDrives for its 3D automotive photography department. The studio specializes in digital post-production for advertising photography, and is internationally known for the high quality of its automotive imaging.

"We are impressed with the RenderDrive's ease of use and the extremely high-quality ray-tracing effects in the automotive images we've created," says Will Powell, head of 3D production at Saddington & Baynes. "The software renderers we've tried couldn't provide the same level of imagery nor handle the large 3D data sets required for our automotive rendering."

The four RenderDrive RD5000 models will give Saddington's designers access to 144 AR350 ray-tracing processors, 36 in each RD5000. The processors will enable the studio's designers and artists to increase realism through advanced 3D rendering features such as multiple area lights, accurate 3D motion blur and depth of field, secondary illumination, HDRI lighting, and physically based materials, lighting and camera properties.

RenderDrive provides hardware-accelerated ray tracing for popular applications such as Autodesk VIZ, CATIA, 3ds max and Maya. It offers 3D rendering performance matching that of a renderfarm but without the associated set-up and maintenance costs. Each system features capacity in excess of 30 million polygons and rendering speed up to 60 times faster than software ray tracing.

The modular ray-tracing architecture within RenderDrive enables 3D rendering to be split across an array of chips, and provides full-frame previews in seconds. This speeds up tasks such as lighting set-up, shot composition, and material mapping.

About ART VPS Ltd.

ART VPS Ltd. (www.artvps.com) offers hardware-accelerated 3D ray tracing that improves design communication and helps reduce the time and cost required to bring a new project to market. ART VPS systems are used by some of the world's leading design and manufacturing companies, including Bombardier Aerospace, Learjet, Nikon, and Procter & Gamble; architectural firms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Bovis Lend Lease, and Chapman Taylor Partners; and entertainment companies such as IBM Interactive and Walt Disney Imagineering.