Considering Keyshot but have a few questions.

[DaveC]

Ok so I found KS and downloaded the demo (which has now unfortunatly expired, 15 days is too short to evaluate in my opinion).  There were some things I noticed, it could be that KS doesn't do it or that I just didn't know how but they are important befor a big purchase like this.

1.  I use KeyCreator so obviously not being popular like SWX there is no direct import,  So I would be forced into using STEP.  The problem there is that I lose all of the textures/materials when importing.  This means everytime I would change the CAD model(s) I would need to re-import and then re-texture, and re-assign materials which is a major pain.  This requires playing and tweaking the scale and position of textures all over again.  A simple change of a few models would be hours of re-work in KS. This is VERY time consuming to the point where it keeps me away from buying right now.  Is there a workaround that I missed, or will it be addressed in the future?

2. There should be either a wireframe representation or a solid model mode which allows for quick manipulation of objects.  When I tried to arrange things and move textures etc. the "realtime" rendering was so laggy that it made moving things around way too slow.  This is because the scene was pretty large.  I would move, wait, move again, wait, rotate, wait, tweak again, wait.  This was painful.  I could go in and "dumb- down" the render settings make changes, then re-set everything.   I did that but it was still too slow, and then you need to go back and reset everything back after you are done.  It would be much nicer if there was a button to toggle simple render "layout mode" or regular.  If there was a way to have a flat shaded non shadowed mode where updates were truly realtime it would help ALLOT.   Will/could this be added?

3. There was an import bug where some revolved surfaces didn't come in right.  Say you had an arc revolved 90deg. to form like an in-dent like a finger clearance on a CD player where you insert the disk.  When imported to KS instead of a spherical indent I got a football-shaped piece that stuck out.  I also had an object that had a truncated sphere but it made it a complete ball after import.  This seems like a bug.  Will this be fixed?

4. I notice there is a lack of light types.  There should be different lights like spot lights, point lights etc.  Right now all you get is HDRI which is fine for some things but if you are in an area where that is blocked you need more options.  I know you can make things emissive but still that isn't as easy and doesn't have the same effect that real spot lights etc would have.

5. is there a way to have a simple texture mode? For example if I have a model of an LCD monitor, and a label of what is on the screen there should be a way to just have the label automatically scale to fit the face.  As it was I had to play with the scale, U V position etc and fiddle with typing the numbers until it fit right.  This is made worse by the fact that if you need to modify the model , you need to import and redo this again.  It was very time consuming.  Will something be added there or did I just miss it?

I liked the render result (minus the keyshot stamped all over it) but there were a few issues making it too time consuming at this point.  Should I just wait for a future version? Will these things be addressed?

[guest84672]

@1 - When you re-import the changed model, you simply select "retain materials" in the import dialog. This will maintain all the material assignments.

@2 - ALT + P will enter Performance Mode.

@3 - We continue to improve our importers. Every CAD system has a different way of writing out their geometry. Please provide an example and we will take a look. KeyCreator can also write out obj files which is much preferred.

@4 - All lighting is coming from HDRIs. You can rotate the HDRIs and change the height of the HDRI as well to get the proper lighting from your scene.

@5 - Simply adjust the texture to the right size to match the screen. Since you can chose to retain materials this only needs to be done once.

I hope this helps.

[DaveC]

Ok, is there a way to re-download the demo to test this?

I know from the past that OBJ files don't work very well, this could be a KeyCreator thing, but it makes a mess of things.  It converts everything to triangles and sometimes it makes them rough so you get a very faceted OBJ model.

The lighting thing is bad news.  Say for example you wanted to do the inside of a room, now the HDRI is no good as walls block it and you can't add things like track lights etc.  This is something that should be added, all competitive products have different types of lights.  Also lights should be able to cast or not cast shadows.  This means that lights could be used as ambient fill lighting.  Again most rendering packages like Lightwave have this.

[quigley]

DaveC try SimLab Composer for converting to OBJ or even to the Keyshot BIP format - works very well.

Also you CAN do interior renders with Keyshot provided you have control over the HDRI. I use a fantastic app called HDR LightStudio for this - think of it as the Keyshot of HDRIs. With this you can edit existing HDRIs and add lights exactly where you need them. OK doing an interior AEC viz from purely artificial lighting is tough but for external, internals through windows etc it works well.

No you can't do spotlights etc but then I don't think Keyshot is really aimed at that kind of market. It does what it does very well, and very efficiently. If you need all the extra bells and whistles (and the learning curve that goes with it) there are other apps.

I use SolidWorks with Modo, Maxwell and Keyshot. I do over 80% of my renders in Keyshot. I use Maxwell and Modo for those places where Keyshot doesn't go. All in all Keyshot is the best software investment I ever made - once you use it there is no going back to the old ways!