Luxion and Sabertooth Kick Up LuSt in Cloud

A new offering launched by Luxion, makers of the popular CPU-based renderer KeyShot, and its partner Sabertooth, a digital production house, is targeting an emerging market, driven by advertising agencies and corporate marketing divisions that want to let clients and consumers configure their products online and instantly preview the results.

LuSt, the new product delivered by the Luxion-Sabertooth partnership, is described as an “interactive 3D rendering web service platform.” Since web-hosted software has successfully branded itself as SaaS (software as a service), Luxion is pitching its web-hosted rendering option as RaaS (rendering as a service).

In the announcement, Luxion wrote, “One of the key challenges in utilizing 3D assets to create imagery for consumer-oriented solutions is rendering. Product designers and marketers want to show every possible option to the potential customer; however, the costs of creating multiple versions of the assets becomes very labor intensive and expensive ... [With LuSt] Product variations are created by the user through selection of product options and the environments they want the client to experience. The image is then created on demand and delivered to the user.”

LuSt is available for desktop, server, or cloud-hosted setups, according to the company. Luxion expects LuSt to be adopted by merchants who want to deliver showroom kiosks and websites with interactive product configurators and viewers.

(This market is also pursued by Bunkspeeed, which develops and markets the GPU-based renderer Bunkspeed SHOT, and Mackevision, which offers the online rendering platform F_BOX Picture Shooter. For more, read “Rendering on Someone Else’s Server Farms,” June 2011.)

Pricing for LuSt is not yet published. Luxion wrote, “Full, turn-key solutions are available for LuSt, including custom interface development and server deployment, setup and overall product maintenance. Pricing will vary based on the implementation approach the client chooses (Server-based or hosted) as well as on the number of simultaneous users the solution should be able to handle.”

In another push for the cloud, Luxion also released KeyShotVR, which lets you publish web-viewable 3D objects and scenes. “KeyShotVR is an integrated add-on to KeyShot Pro that automatically generates the code to be embedded into any website or company intranet, making it a turnkey solution for web content creation,” the company explained.

KeyShotVR is touch-responsive. Those who view KeyShotVR scenes from multitouch devices (like iPhone and iPad) may use fingertip navigation to interact with published scenes. The plug-in is offered for $1,000. The product is currently under Beta testing and expected to become available in the next few weeks.

For more, watch the video demonstration below: