Bloom Unit is now free to download and use.

Bloom Unit is a cloud based, physically accurate renderer for Sketchup, now downloadable for free.

Coming with one free hour you can trial and test with, users then purchase more hours at $6 an hour.

Simply head over to http://www.bloomunit.com to download now, also don't forget to check http://www.youtube.com/bloomunit for more movies and interesting features!

Note; We are aware of an issue when arraying our light objects where it creates two lights ontop of each other at the terminal point of the array. This is being fixed as we speak.

Please post any questions you might have and I'll do my best to answer promptly.

Enjoy!

Conducting personal experiments in the lead up to the free release, have a look, 21 reflections in real time!

The free release of Bloom Unit will be early next week, still have to finish testing the website and the latest version of the plugin on our end.

Nearly there though!

Hello all,

New video is now live, hopefully it might answer some questions you have! Stay tuned for that switch over to free, still not quite live.

Hope its informative!

Its largely the same information as on here, however i've started to add more updated information to our facebook and twitter feeds, if you want updates a bit more conveniently!

https://twitter.com/Bloom_Unit

(www.facebook.com)

Well, I could take credit that we were super reactive to these forum demands in particular, but they were more of a final push from other feedback we'd had.

The technology is just a bit too different and its hard to understand it entirely until you use it yourself so we think this approach is necessary.

I do hope everyone has fun with it once its out though!

Haha!

No, I'm just a wonderful person, but we had a plan to reimburse users with 300 dollars worth of hours, but this is much simpler if you just wait

But the 'boss' is of the same opinion.

Be in touch!

Bloom Unit will be getting a large adjustment in the coming days.

It will be going free to download and use for one hour. Users are then able to purchase more hours for 6 dollars an hour after that first hour is used.

This will be going into effect toward the end of the week or early next week, so please, stay tuned for news and refrain from purchasing until that happens!

Archigrafix,

Yes, we've been very deep down in improving the product so our website has had less attention than it should have. But we are now giving it a bit of an overhaul because of a large number of problems that have become clear to us.

I can also now announce that after some licensing changes we're now able to offer Bloom Unit for free with one hour of cloud time, its not live on the website yet, but it will be soon. So wait for another announcement from myself that that change is live, it'll be happening later this week or early next week at current estimate!

Then users will decide if they want to buy more hours at 6 dollars an hour (which is used in 10 minute segments).

To put it in a vague and simplistic term - stay tuned for upcoming announcements!

At the same time, you're also getting a library (that will expand) of manufacturers light fittings and 308 (at current) high definition materials.

There are also licensing costs that have been in flux until recently regarding the rendering and delivery technology.

However, as I said, stay tuned!

Rich O'Brien has the essence of it.

My company makes a renderer that functions on a 'no options, what you see is what you would really see' type of arrangement which has been aimed at beginners though.

http://www.youtube.com/bloomunit, could be worth a look

Hello guys,

mitcorb - The servers are currently done primarily from the servers in Virginia run by Amazon. The latency delay is minimal since the server runs the updates constantly, and you simply get the latest image your network allows. So a super fast connection will get 10 updates in 5 seconds, or even as we've seen, many more, but a very slow connection will get 2 or 1 in 5 seconds at worst. Functionally, you still get to the excellent render in the same timeframe.

Ecuadorian - Its a good idea for a company to do this, to simply add the cloud hours to their costs, its no doubt much cheaper than the high spec machine and the high quality operator who would sit on it so I wouldn't think the client would complain greatly. Unfortunately there isnt a way to see it running on your machine as a 'test' since all the hours we would have to pay for ourselves from Amazon. But I can tell you we've run it from the UK off the Amazon servers and its been perfectly fast, I assume Ecuador would be a similar distance, and similar performance.

Let me know about any further questions guys!

Thank you, yes that is the case

Good example of BU in practice;

http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?3715-How-good-can-this-be-rendered

Just another note for some of the posts I've seen

• The cloud rendering if you view the http://www.youtube.com/bloomunit site is much faster than anything local that is currently available.

• RealityServer is the base product underlying Bloom Unit, and is entirely owned by us now.

• We are moving toward an ability to also facilitate local rendering as well, but no clear times are available for that. But it is entirely within our abilities.

Hope this was of some help!

I hope its informative, i found this thread, created an account and tried to answer everything pretty quick, if you have any questions i havent answered I'll do my best to help!

Some Images of Renders from BU I've made

The other image!

Some Images from BU

And as for information about the engine its using iray, but distributing via the cloud by a technology known as realityserver, developed by partners of ours called mental images. Iray's requirements are quite high, and we know not everyone is able to meet those requirements, so we've made a product that allows the crappiest laptops able to achieve high quality rendering. It even works on 3G connections since the server is working and throwing images at you constantly. Which you can save when your happy with the quality.

So its all cloud based at the moment, 1 dollar for 10 minutes, 6 dollars for one hour (minimum purchase being 1 hour, and is bought in increments of 1 hour).

I'll try to answer questions as they appear!