URS
URS is the world’s largest global engineering design firm. A leading U.S. federal government contractor with 27,800 employees, URS provides a comprehensive range of professional planning, design, systems engineering and technical assistance, program and construction management, and operations and maintenance services.
Designing large infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges and airports, URS
is part of an elite group of firms that is rapidly adopting powerful new tools to maximize their competitiveness. Although the construction industry has operated for years with concept sketches and building blueprints, it is now taking a page from the playbook of the automobile and aeronautical industries where sophisticated computer-based design and production tools are the norm.
A wave of new software tools are redefining the way engineering firms can design, plan,
communicate, market, and supervise large construction projects. These tools also have specific hardware requirements that differ from traditional IT systems originally designed for enterprise-type back-end work. URS recognized the benefit of producing high-quality visuals of its designs but did not have the right hardware to make the rendering process efficient and dependable for its design team.
After looking at several options they chose to build a dedicated render farm with renderBOXX systems.
Civil engineering projects have a widespread influence on the location where they are built. They must attempt to reconcile the priorities of many stakeholders: public agencies, government, engineering firms, contractors, various associations, and local communities. That is why accurate and convincing communication of key aspects of the project is so important. Accurate and appealing visuals can play an important role in this respect, so this is where a powerful and reliable rendering capability comes in.
By producing highly accurate and appealing visuals of a project, URS can more effectively market its designs to public agencies that fund infrastructure projects. In turn, agencies can build support for projects using both still images and highly realistic animations that allow interested parties to visualize the design. URS can also use the high-quality visuals to better communicate its design concepts to other members of the building team, thus accelerating project time lines with better coordination and shorter revision cycles.
Fast rendering drives many efficiencies for a civil engineering firm
“We were not ideally set-up to quickly perform many high-quality renderings and animations,” says Jeff Coleman, Manager of the Creative Imaging Department at URS. “We originally rendered on the team’s workstation during the night, but we found that was not a satisfactory solution. The machines did not all have the same architecture, which caused problems. Some of them would break down in the middle of the render. The rendering time was too long, so we could not run many versions of the animation or image we were working on. Some machines were not always available. We tried to build our own nodes but the research involved and the labor required to assemble and troubleshoot the systems was not the best use of URS resources or our time”.
