Best settings for rendering leather shoes?

[JTaylorSmith]

Hello everyone who clicked on my post!

A lot of my work consists of modelling shoes in Romans CAD, rendering in Keyshot, and doing touch up work in Photoshop. The company I work for primarily uses these renderings as a means of seeing color/leather combinations on shoes without having to make physical prototypes for all the possible variations of a new shoe design.


What combination of settings (HDRI maps, bump maps, camera settings, etc.) have you found to give the best results for rendering shoes/leather goods?

Do you use different lighting environments/settings for every shoe? Or do you have a default environment that you use for every shoe?

What combination of bump map/texture settings give you the most realistic leather renderings?


Let me know, and thanks in advance!