Keshot 8 bugs or not

[Paul Lang]

Just posted a render to Amazing Shots, (attached below) Spent a bit of time this week playing around with a new scene utilizing some of the new features. I know that Keyshot was not original design to handle exterior renders with lots of nature elements but thought I would share some of my findings and issues with this last render. PolyCount was a huge issue, the more I imported trees and applied displacements to objects the slower Keyshot got, I mean really, really slow to the point it would take up to a min to calculate a displacement or recalculate to make a change. Had to work on almost every element in the scene one at a time with everything else turned off and in performance mode but that only made performance a bit better still slow. Imported two trees and used pattern tool to make more, my impression is that this is suppose to improve performance as if there were only actually two trees? I have not had any success with the pattern tool without making things really slow.

Lots of crashes, Keyshot would seem to hang, like completely freeze when I turned on render region and switch from performance mode to basic, the weird thing though is the file would complete delete itself, this happened tree times and I would have to recover one of the backup saves, thank god I have that turned on... I know some if this may be horsepower related and I could use more cores but I am running a decent machine with 16 cores and 64gigs of ram  so most of the time things run pretty smoothly.

Copying and pasting materials from one object to another seems to take along time now like it is calculating something complicated.
Material editor bug. Ie. Diffuse, spec, rough, bump/norm and now displace, as soon as you add a utility node between texture and base material i.e. bump add the bump is no longer synced with the rest so if you make a change to scale/position/offset to the diffuse material it won't apply those changes to any material with a utility node. (work around - disconnect bump from utility node, connect to diffuse color to inherent its aspects and then back to bump add node.

Not sure if this is what it is doing but it appears that if you have more than one object in your scene with displacement applied and you make a change and apply one of them it seems to recalculate all geometry that has displacements?

Opacity, Opacity Maps give the illusion of transparency but when it comes to render layers or clown passes keyshot only recognizes the base geometry, rendering clown passes useless for compositing. Render layers is a bit better but base geometry is still evident in the layers. (attached).

Flakes: This is a neat feature but too restricting for commercial use. A decent particle tool/existing pattern tool upgrade would be able to achieve the same effects and a whole lot more without the restrictions. Just for fun I attempted to make grass or fur using flakes/squares with a billboard approach using a few blades of grass and an opacity map. It got close but it was very heavy and had no control over the directions/rotation of the flakes, worth a try.

Thats if for now have to get back to work.

cheers,

Paul

[KeyShot]

We have made improvements to the performance of displacements on many objects in 8.1. We also fixed an issue where custom uv layouts could cause issues. Please contact us at beta@luxion.com if you would like to try 8.1 (we expect to release it mid November).

Regarding the clown pass then it should respect opacity maps. Can you share a scene with beta@luxion.com that shows the issues you are facing? Likewise, if you experience any instabilities then please let us know. The only major instability we are aware of was related to a graphics driver on an Apple iMac causing issues. We found a workaround and 8.1 should be much better.

[Paul Lang]

Would love to try the beta once available, Another I forgot to mention. Copying and pasting a material from one part to another that has no geometry node attached also triggers all materials in the scene that do have geometry nodes applied to recalculate. I have sent some videos along with my scene file uploading to you shortly. Also what happened to the render region button in the image tab? only way to access now is to bring up the render option window.

Paul