Playing Around With KeyShot

I wanted to upload my Piston Cup model to my account at GrabCAD. I had modeled it in KOMPAD-3D and wanted to do better than attaching a simple screen shot to the GrabCAD page along with the 3D model. So I decided to try my hand at some rendering and asked Thomas Teger, VP or Marketing at Luxion, if he could send me a NFR copy of KeyShot, which he immediately did. I am a novice at rendering. I have fiddled around a little, but not too much. So this post is actually more like a “Rendering For Dummies” with the dummy here being me. 😉

KeyShot is very easy to use, as can be seen from this “How It Works” page on their web site. You basically import your model, apply materials, choose a lighting, set a background image if you want, adjust your camera as necessary and hit “Render”. I simply skipped the last two steps. Here is the KOMPAS-3D model imported into KeyShot.

I then dropped some materials on the parts of the model.

As you drop materials, the scene is photo realistically rendered in real time. So you get a pretty good idea of what the final render will look like. I then chose a lighting scheme of a studio environment and hit “Render”.

As you can see the final render is just a little bit crisper than the previous screen shot. Here are a couple of close ups.

This is basically what I came up in two minutes. I just wanted something that looked nice for GrabCAD. Obviously a rendering expert could come up with something much better and more realistic than a novice like me.

Come to think of it, I wonder if any you rendering experts will be interested in giving this a shot. You can download the STEP file of the Piston Cup from here of from this GrabCAD page. Send me a couple of renders along with the name and version of the rendering software you used. Also send me your name and contact information if you want to. My email address is deelip (at) sycode (dot) com. I’ll select a few good ones and post them on this blog.