Whilst the LightWork renderer in Shark is very useful - it's certainly not fantastic or easy to use. (here is the somewhat dated stuff that I've done with it over the years http://www.industrialart...vices/visualisation.html)

KeyShot seems to be the recommended external renderer - indeed with a live link from Shark, but it's quite expensive and supposedly pretty limited as it's essentially a bunch of studio presets !?

Blender is free and very very powerful - but it's got more buttons than Cadbury and who wants that, unless rendering is your sole and primary focus

Daz 3D has a free 3D element, but having downloaded it and realised it's focus is mostly 'rendering women' and getting you to sign up for more stuff, I find myself distrusting it

Maxwell render is amazing, but horribly slow and very complicated

And so it goes on

There are lots of others - I just wonder what design folk here are migrating to given that the internal renderer doesn't appear to be developing much

Jol

>>KeyShot seems to be the recommended external renderer - indeed with a live link from Shark, but it's quite expensive and supposedly pretty limited as it's essentially a bunch of studio presets !?

I really enjoy KeyShot, it produces some amazing results quickly but understand the cost comment.

I have been pushing the KeyShot for ViaCAD/Shark license. This is much lower cost version (1/4). This is lower because it is limited to use with ViaCAD/Shark and does not include their CAD translators.

I'll bring it up again to the Encore guys as a possible add-on.


Tim

A good alternative to KeyShot, I think, is a SimLab Composer. It is not expensive, easy to use and gives good results. There is a free version.

But KeyShot is without doubt a much more powerful and convenient application. The price corresponds to the features that it has.

I think turning a cad application into a complete render package would be pointless, composing a complicated scene is better done in a dedicated package. However updating the software with a modern realtime render engine is much needed, for reviewing models as you design them or for photo realistic visualisation. One thing needed is a revision of the perspective view setup.

A company called Geometric, who nowadays concentrate on Glovius and Babel3D viewer and translator, developed a program called 3D Paintbrush, it was intended to provided drag-and-drop materials and shaders, near-photoreal real-time rendering. Geometric abandoned the development of it, but they're happy to provide the program for free. Another abandoned project that had potential was 4Dblue, a modelling, staging and rendering program. I liked it because it was quite fast, you can write the shaders and materials yourself and it paid more attention to sub-surface scattering for translucent materials than any other renderer that I've tried. AMD and Intel are providing increasingly sophisticated GPUs with their CPUs, and they're preoccupied with gaming, so getting best possible rendering dynamically. I think that CAD and design programs are eventually going to benefit most from that development stream, and from so-called "augmented reality", where you can point your phone's camera at the contextual surroundings that your design is intended for, the model is viewed there on the phone's screen and you can take a screen shot of the model in situ.
Personally, I model thinking about the geometry and leave the finishes and staging to after that's completed. I can count the number of times I've quality-rendered mid-workflow on two hands, but I suppose it could be argued that that's partly because renderers are slow and cumbersome to set up!

Edited by user Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:35:17 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified