Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/135926
review rendering KeyShot 4 $995 - $3995 (depending on options) Luxion www.luxion.com Luxion KeyShot By George Maestri When working with 3d projects, the final render is what your audience will see. Getting excellent-quality renders can make a project stand out from the pack. For those who are interested in highly realistic renders, there are a number of third-party rendering software that can take your 3D or CAD files and make them look spectacular. Often, however, the process of making a great render can be a difficult one. KeyShot, from Luxion, is aiming to make high-quality rendering easy with Version 4. KeyShot 4 is a stand-alone render engine. It can import files in a wide variety of formats, giving it the ability to support most major 3D and CAD packages. The software is entirely CPU-based, which tends to run against the grain of most renderers, which are increasingly dependent on the power of high-end graphics cards. This makes KeyShot very friendly to any type of computer, including laptops without fancy graphics cards. The software is fairly straightforward to use. Importing a scene brings across the geometry and the materials in the scene. Animation can also be imported, depending on the version of KeyShot. For people using Dassault's Solidworks, PTC's Creo, and Robert McNeel and Associates' Rhino, 30 ■ CGW M ay / J u ne 2 0 1 3 scenes can be live linked so that changes in the original scene are reflected in the renders. Once the scene is in KeyShot, the software automatically starts rendering the image. The image will progressively get better in quality the longer the render sits on the screen. This gives rendering a highly interactive feel, as changes in parameters are almost instantly visible in the constantly updating render. When importing scenes, the first task is to assign KeyShot materials to the models. All KeyShot materials are physically accurate to the type of surface they represent. Wood is very different from glass, for example, so a wood material would not have a refraction setting, while a glass material would. This makes it very straightforward to author new materials. KeyShot also has a very robust materials library that ships with the package, so often it is easier to start with an existing material and tweak it to get the look you want. You can save your own materials to the library, as well. Textures are handled on a material-bymaterial basis. Bitmap textures will apply to the existing UV mapping baked into the models, so the UVs need to be set up in the software of choice. For models without baked-in mapping, KeyShot provides some simple projection methods (planar, box, spherical, and cylindrical). These tools have a degree of interactivity, so placement of projected maps can be fine-tuned. Additionally, KeyShot has a feature called Labeling, which allows bitmaps to be placed on an object like a label. Lighting in KeyShot Lighting is probably the most important feature of a renderer. For KeyShot, the main light source of choice is the environment, in the form of an HDRI image. You can provide your own HDRI images, or KeyShot comes with a number of stock images that can be used as interiors or exteriors. These images not only determine lighting, they also factor in to reflections and other environmental effects. For those needing more specific lighting, physical lights can be added into the scene. Luxion provides three types of light – a point light that can simulate standard IES light types, a diffuse light that turns geometry into a light, and an area light. All these are physically accurate, with light intensity measured in watts or lumens. For more realistic renders, the software