3D CAD/CAM vendor Alibre has announced a new bundle deal for Luxion KeyShot rendering and Alibre’s Design Expert and Alibre Professional.

The alliance between Alibre and Luxion is not news. Alibre has already announced plans to work with Luxion. Previously, Alibre had a deal with Bunkspeed and as everyone who reads this site knows, Henrik Wann Jensen who had partnered with Bunkspeed to license the rendering technology went out on his own to Luxion. The details of the split are way too tedious to go into here, though both sides seem to really enjoy recounting it over and over. For a backgrounder, check out this link.

Alibre opted to follow Luxion to Keyshot 2. Max Freeman, Alibre’s VP of marketing tells us they thought it would be better to go with Luxion since the company had technology ready to go, while Bunkspeed was scrambling to plug in a new renderer. “We had two choices, move to Luxion who had a product today or stick it out with Bunkspeed who did not have a product to ship.”

Bunkspeed managed to get mental images iRay renderer working pretty quickly and they’re now selling Bunkspeed Shot. The iRay technology is interesting because it takes advantage of Nvidia’s processing to speed ray tracing.

From Alibre’s point of view, the Luxion renderer is better suited to Alibre’s customer base because it doesn’t require a specific type of GPU. “Luxion makes business sense — Bunkspeed is moving more towards hard core people who want to dump money into hardware. Luxion’s goal is to make things work fast on a laptop or other low cost hardware,” says Freeman.

So, what is news is that Alibre has worked with Luxion to support direct output to Luxion’s BIP format for seamless file exchange. The company says that the link between Alibre and KeyShot 2 enables cleaner, easier, and faster 3D rendered models. And, we suppose the marketing strategy used by Alibre and Luxion to position Bunkspeed as a solution for “hard core” people.

Alibre Design Expert is priced at $1199 and Professional is $599.