Large Assembly Render

[oxfordlad]

Hi there I'm fairly new to keyshot and was wondering how or what is the best way to go around rendering a large assembly?

Is there a maximum component count which keyshot can deal with?

[Speedster]

what is the best way to go around rendering a large assembly?

The same way the violinist gets to Carnegie Hall-  Practice, Practice, Practice!

Kidding aside, it does take practice and patience.  I work constantly with large assemblies of hundreds, if not thousands, of parts.  The resulting .bip can be huge, up to (in my case) 8-10 GB. And 100,000,000- 800,000,000 plus polys!  So it also takes horsepower to do it- I'm running 32 cores on an overclocked, liquid-cooled BOXX machine, with 64 GB of RAM and three TB of memory, with a 240 GB SSD C drive.

I honestly don't believe there is a top end limit to component count.

Do as much as possible in the "Performance" mode, switching to "Quality" only to check out materials against your lighting.

I can't emphasize this enough.  Be REALLY careful when mapping your parts for later application of KS materials.  You will likely miss something, and have to go back into the native CAD to fix it, which really sucks! I usually pull a quickie render of the part or smaller sub-assembly just to test my mapping before moving on.  On smaller assemblies the "update" feature usually works.  But it seldom works on large assemblies- it's something to do with file size.  So be careful and VERY painstaking in your UV mapping!

You will likely find it takes a long time to import a really large assembly.  Again, be patient!  You will get a sense as to if or when it is likely to fail.  Even on 32 cores, 64 GB of RAM, etc., I've had imports take several hours.  You may also have to try several different import techniques.  For me, large SolidWorks assemblies seldom if ever import using the plug-in- it usually crashes SW.  So you may have to try several options.

On large assemblies, where you will be rendering the whole assembly, fillets may not be needed for your image.  If not, then I suggest suppressing all fillets under, say, .03 radii.  Fillets are the single largest hit on poly count.

Lastly- if you are using physical lights, IES profiles or the like, try to hold off on them until the very end.  They can really hit performance!

Hope some of these tricks will help, and don't get discouraged- KeyShot will get you there! 

Bill G