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URS Corporations
URS is among the largest global engineering design firms and a leading U.S. federal government contractor providing a comprehensive range of professional planning, design, systems engineering and technical assistance, program and construction management, and operations and maintenance services with over 25,000 employees.
The firm designs 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 (e.g. Autodesk® Revit® Building Information Modeling). 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.
The Challenge: Processing high quality visuals
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 possess 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.
The Solution
In order to improve their process and reduce the time to render their designs, URS investigated several options and ultimately chose BOXX to help build a dedicated render farm featuring renderBOXX, their purpose‐built dedicated rendering solution.
For 2010, BOXX has introduced the renderPRO, a personal desk side rendering option, to their line of professional rendering solutions. The compact renderPRO features Intel Xeon processors in three models: PRO4, PRO8, and PRO12, with model numbers indicating the number of processing cores in each.
BOXX also makes record‐setting, purpose built workstations like the 3DBOXX 4850 Extreme which are compatible with the renderBOXX product line.
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. This is where a powerful and reliable rendering capability comes in.
Rendering enables the production of highly accurate and appealing visuals of a project, allowing URS to 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 an 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 time’”.
Familiar Obstacles: Why URS chose BOXX solutions for their render farm
URS has a regular purchasing agreement with a different “tier one” computer company for their normal IT needs, but when it came to building their render farm, they could not find the optimal solution.
“We considered using enterprise servers for rendering but soon realized that they included expensive enterprise‐class features that did not add any real value to a render farm. And, in most cases, the enterprise‐type servers were twice the price of renderBOXX modules. We had seen BOXX demonstrating the APEXX superworkstation at SIGGRAPH, and after some research, we chose BOXX because the company had exactly the kind of systems we needed for rendering. We also chose BOXX because the [BOXX] people were knowledgeable about what we do You spoke animation and that made us confident we would get what we needed.”
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