3D industrial animations - summary of my projects done with Keyshot and Blender

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

Hello everyone,

Although this is my first post on the forum I am undoubtedly not new to the Keyshot software. So far I have been reading forum and website only, watching webinars and other materials from Luxion. Finally I found some spare time to say a few words about myself and share with you with my projects.

First contact with Keyshot software I had at the university nearly ten years ago. I fell in love with the results and ease with achieving them. Sadly after that I had nothing in common with CGI working for many years as sales engineer for various high-tech and industrial companies. It all has changed quite recently when I decided to quit the job for and start my own venture doing 3D animations for industrial customers. The company is doing very well and today I am honored to finally share with the community demo reel with summarizes projects I did for our customers.

https://youtu.be/ziytGu4CWwQ

Currently I am using Keyshot 10.1, Blender 2.91 and After Effects for some postproduction works and animated titles. I experimented with various workflows, render engines but since alembic import works quite ok, Keyshot became my one and only rendering tool.

As you may guess, this is a results of dozens of hours spent at many projects. If you enjoyed it, leave a comment please to share with your feedback, it will be very appreciated. At the same time if you have any questions about combining Blender and Keyshot, feel free to ask me, I will share my experience with pleasure,

If you would like to see more projects and read a little bit more about the company itself, feel free to visit https://cadilight.com

Best regards,
Kuba Grabarczyk

[Higuchi]

Looks really easy to understand how the machine works!

Actually, also I'm wondering if I should start to use Blender besides Keyshot. I'm curious about the expression for water flow starting from 0:43 on your movie. I guess you modeled and simulated it on Blender, didn't you? Could you please tell me more details of this workflow? You rendered the animation just on Keyshot, not Blender, right?

starting from 0:43
https://youtu.be/ziytGu4CWwQ?t=43

Thank you,

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

Thank you for your comment.

Yes, I did. Actually, every single piece of scene in this reel was modeled and animated/simulated in Blender. After doing it I bake all the animations and export them via alembic file into Keyshot. Then all the materials and lighting are done in Keyshot. Cameras also can be imported from Blender where you can control them way easier than in Keyshot (unfortunately).

The main drawback of that workflow is when customers want to make some changes I need to start over or import alembic model again using option "update geometry". Sadly, it works quite tricky and using it is not a pleasure at all. Nevertheless for some small changes it works quite ok.

For very rare cases I need to do rendering in Cycles and then compose it with the rest of the renders in the After Effects. I do it mainly for fire/smoke and some particles simulations.

Kuba

[Chad Holton]

Looks great, Kuba. Glad you had the courage to follow your passion. It's nice to wake up each morning excited to work instead of dreading it.

[Higuchi]

Thank you for so helpful workflow, Kuba! It's the first time for me to know Alembic.
By the way, why do you transfer to Keyshot from Blender all the way? I think rendering by Cycle looks as well as Kesyhot, doesn't it?

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

Personally, I don't think so. When I take a look at the renders considered to be very good made in Cycles it still looks to me like very well prepared render. In Keyshot the final results are way more realistic. At the same time I never had enough time to learn materials in Blender, in KS I can do it very intuitive way and quickly. This is hard to catch in words but when I see Keyshot render I think "oh, this is real photorealism", Cycles render i think "oh, someone really did his best to get as close as possible to photorealism"

Overall Blender is wonderful software and Cycles is very good too (and very versatile) but since I do mostly product oriented animations Keyshot provides much better results with a quick and easy workflow.

[Higuchi]

I see, I got it! Surely, Keyshot can render as we look at in the real world. Meanwhile, Blender can use modifier as well as 3DS-MAX, can't it?

Anyway, thank you my teacher! I'm going to train Blender to simulate something complex.

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

Yes, sure. Blender is very versatile piece of software, you can do actually everything you can think of. And of course it uses modifiers system. Since 2.8 version it became much more user friendly, so I recommend giving it a try,

[Josh3D]

Welcome, Kuba! This looks great and have to agree with others that it makes it easy to understand how the machines operate. Really looking forward to seeing more of your work!

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

Hello everyone!

I was quite busy recently but finally find some time to prepare a short case study article for the website of my company ofering 3D animations for industrial companies. This is short explanation and final effect of the explainer video project we made using Blender and Keyshot. There is not much information in the internet about Blender/Keyshot workflow so I will answer all the questions with pleasure.

Take a look and enjoy!

https://cadilight.com/en/articles/case-study-alladin-easyfit-isolators-3d-explainer-animation-isolating-valves-installation-usage-instruction/

Kuba

[Kuba Grabarczyk]

Here you have the youtube video only, for those who don't want to read the article: