Cubicspace is shipping its ground breaking Windows-based real time visualisation solution, rtre™. By providing instant, interactive, superior quality visual feedback for anyone designing in 3D, buildings, interiors and other designs are produced to a higher quality and in shorter timescales.

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rtre is a suite of plug-ins and stand-alone tools for Autodesk's VIZ and Discreet's 3ds max applications. rtre uses Cubicspace's own highly sophisticated and advanced rendering engine to deliver a massive performance increase over existing technology. It is able to render multi-million polygon textured scenes in fractions of a second rather than minutes or hours. This performance level enables users to navigate scenes smoothly and freely at 30 frames per second (fps).

"Until now there has been a complete bottleneck for those wishing to communicate design intent through visual presentation," says Steven Markham, co-founder and CEO of Cubicspace. "Established methods, particularly for architects and real estate professionals, involve images and movies that can take several hours or days to generate. This prevents late updates and ties up system resources, when they could be available for other use. At the other end of the scale, virtual reality systems offer instant images but at an unsatisfactory level of quality and require very powerful, expensive and mostly specialist systems for viewing. By taking a fresh approach and investing many years in this project, we have produced a system in rtre that achieves the ultimate goal of superior quality rendering running in real-time on desktop and laptop Windows PCs."

Interactive design
rtre's powerful rendering engine can interactively generate 30 photorealistic images per second from complex 3D scenes of over one million polygons, even on a laptop computer. Other rendering styles - also delivered at the same real time rate - include shaded, wireframe, transparent, hidden line, silhouette, cartoon style, hard and soft line sketching and pencil fill. rtre operates as a stand-alone viewer and within Autodesk VIZ and 3ds max, reading data directly from those applications without exporting. As a result, any design changes made to a 3D scene are reflected in photorealism (or other desired rendering styles) while they are being made. A new system of spatial control using assigned keystrokes and mouse actions provides users with full six-degrees-of-freedom (6dof) navigation, providing genuine real time "walk through" capabilities of scenes during design. Further interaction through triggers and collision detection enhances realism. rtre interactive visualisations also benefit from 3D positional sound using award winning technology from Sensaura to provide true 3D sound from only two speakers.

"We have taken the time to ensure that rtre should be a comprehensive, professional solution that surpassed technical boundaries. We've invested five years of development time in reaching the stage where it is just that, with further enhancements in development for release later this year and into 2003," adds Markham. "rtre enables unlimited design options to be instantly assessed and gives the user and his or her colleagues an unlimited visual aspect in a photorealistic world of their own creation. Potentially, this will slash project evaluation times and have a positive impact on the buildings themselves."

rtre is available to purchase from Cubicspace directly and starting next month, from approved Autodesk/Discreet stockists.