jonmoore Posted November 18, 2015 Share Posted November 18, 2015 Spent the day putting Keyshot 6 though it's paces for one of my larger studio clients yesterday and must say they've really nailed it with this version. I took a basic model from FormZ into Keyshot (using the new high quality OBJ export options) set up new bespoke materials for all the surfaces, applied a fave HDRI studio lighting rig and had a final render in less than 15 minutes from import. This for me is the beauty of Keyshot. There may be more powerful or more physically accurate rendering packages on the market but none with such a quick and easy workflow. I always shied away from recommending Keyshot to my clients because I thought it was too expensive and the rendering equivalent of keeping stabilizer wheels on your adult bicycle. But they've really nailed the power/ease of use ratio over the last couple of revisions and in a world of 'time is money' I can't think of another renderer that enables you to achieve such professional results so easily, quickly and with a minimum of specialist rendering skills. I still don't see it as a solution that competes with V-Ray, Thea etc for architectural rendering but for product design, set design, exhibition design etc, it's a fantastic weapon to to add to the rendering armoury. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AHTOH Posted November 18, 2015 Share Posted November 18, 2015 Hello jonmoore. To my point of view this pretty simple scene can be rendered with Maxwell with comparable quality in comparable time. It takes time if we will use indirect lighting (e.g. interior scenes). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted November 18, 2015 Author Share Posted November 18, 2015 Hello jonmoore. To my point of view this pretty simple scene can be rendered with Maxwell with comparable quality in comparable time. It takes time if we will use indirect lighting (e.g. interior scenes). The render time itself was less itself was well under 2 minutes. There's no way on earth that Maxwell could render a HDR lit 1280x720 scene in under 2 minutes. And you're missing the point slightly. I'm talking about the speed of the workflow coupled with reasonable quality output. I'm not attempting to show off my rendering skills just show how quick the workflow is - from import to final render. Keyshot now can now work with interior scenes too (where lots of GI bounces are necessary). But as I originally stated it wouldn't be my first choice (that would be V-Ray because of the speed of the Light Cache/Brute Force options). I like Maxwell a lot too, especially where I need accurate caustics/dispersion but I avoid it like the plague for interior scenes where render speed is a concern. Keyshot is a perfect solution for designers that have a good grasp of Photoshop but don't want to concern themselves with the intricacies of rendering simulation technologies. It successfully abstracts much of the complexity without compromising too much of the power. And this is exactly the type of experience many of my clients are looking for. I wouldn't use it so much myself on a regular basis because I'm already very proficient with V-Ray (and Modo's internal renderer, which shares many commonalities with V-Ray) but many designers don't have the depth of experience with rendering technologies as people like you or me. And that's why Keyshot has been a huge success. You don't have to be a specialist to get great results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AHTOH Posted November 18, 2015 Share Posted November 18, 2015 Sounds convincing. I tried myself and fell in love with this toy. Thank`s Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted November 18, 2015 Author Share Posted November 18, 2015 Sounds convincing. I tried myself and fell in love with this toy. Thank`s Expensive toy at that... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Montoya Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 Keyshot is really awesome for its simplicity, but I don't see how it could be used effectively outside of product design. For example, we have to make many rendered revisions when designing exhibits and themed interiors. There's just too many client revisions in this industry. This leaves no time to leave FormZ for another rendering studio. The FormZ model needs to be able to be edited easily, and the textures need to be able to be updated easily. Unless there's a live Plugin inside FormZ, this will never be a viable option. I hoped Maxwell would fill this gap, but it's far too complex and slow for our work, even though my computer is the fastest rendering OSX Mac according to Benchwell. - http://www.maxwellrender.com/benchwell I personally very rarely have to do any post production work on most of my images. This saves tremendous time when facing the continual and inevitable revisions. Get as good of an image as possible, for the time frame, out of FormZ and be done with it. I know this goes against many other peoples workflow, who touch up almost every image they create, but after spending a couple years like that, I learned to better control RenderZone even if the images are taking a little longer to render. If RenderZone scaled up with CPUs, it would be much better. Right now, it doesn't matter that I have 12 processors capable of 24 threads, because RenderZone is not any faster than setting it to use 6. It's just part of the aging engine I guess as it's been brought up many times now, but with no end in sight. It's almost pointless updating RenderZone anyways, as it's handling of light sources is pretty archaic. Simulating modern LED backlighting and accents is incredibly frustrating with RenderZone. GPU + CPU accelerated rendering is the future, and I can't begin to explain how excited I am to see THEA coming to FormZ. In my honest opinion, it should replace RenderZone as the default engine for FormZ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted November 19, 2015 Author Share Posted November 19, 2015 Interesting perspective Justin. The live linking that that currently exists for Keyshot is for: Autodesk Fusion 360 IronCAD PTC Creo & Pro/ENGINEER Rhinoceros Siemens Solid Edge solidThinking Evolve Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Pixologic ZBrush And a good many of these are actively maintained and developed by the partner company not Luxion. Thea is going to be a good solution for many people but it's a very technical render engine, one with many parallels to Maxwell - both use Metropolis Light Transport as their central simulation and approach materials in a very different manner to the likes of V-ray, Arnold and Mental Ray. And this means they have a deeper learning curve if you're to get the best results out. Pylon has done an excellent job providing helpers for converting FormZ materials to Maxwell compatible ones but it's only when you use true Maxwell materials that you get the best results. At the moment Thea has an edge because it offers GPU (and hybrid) solutions but these have significant limitations when compared with the CPU only engine. And Maxwell will soon bring their GPU solution to market; so I think it's a little early for AutoDesSys to be getting into bed with Solid Iris and providing Thea as it's native solution. If anything Nvidia's iRay is a more logical solution as it's developed by Lightworks Design (the developers of the founding technology in RenderZone). But the most important thing for me going forward is choice. Thea and V-Ray have been announced and I'm sure more rendering partnerships will be announced. But I'd definitely agree that partner rendering technology either has to be embedded within FormZ or maintain a live link to external applications due to the change management most studios have to contend with as part of the process of getting their projects signed off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shibui Design Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 Agree with Justin's points above. The killer workflow would be a faster than Maxwell plug in for FMZ. Renderzone does not cut it anymore and some of us in different industries don't have time to model, export, texture, set up cameras and render outside the main design tool and keep this workflow alive. I'll just add that the ultimate work flow for my kind of work would be to do everything inside FMZ, including control drawings. Layout is not yet up to the task. Design/model + render + dimensions/annotate = killer app! When will this void be fulfilled? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted November 19, 2015 Author Share Posted November 19, 2015 Agree with Justin's points above. The killer workflow would be a faster than Maxwell plug in for FMZ. Renderzone does not cut it anymore and some of us in different industries don't have time to model, export, texture, set up cameras and render outside the main design tool and keep this workflow alive. I'll just add that the ultimate work flow for my kind of work would be to do everything inside FMZ, including control drawings. Layout is not yet up to the task. Design/model + render + dimensions/annotate = killer app! When will this void be fulfilled? I agree too. The live linking with Keyshot is ace but the problem for AutoDesSys is one of resources. I doubt whether Luxion would develop a live link bridge themselves so it would be down to AutoDesSys to do this and they've got a lot on their plate with FormZ. With regards to Thea, I can't give away any specifics but I can say that the beta team are united in ensuring Solid Iris provide a fully functional integration that works within FormZ without any compromises or requirements to roundtrip with the Thea Studio application. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Montoya Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 Hey John- While I agree that the results from Maxwell are comparable to Thea and V-Ray, the ease of use is missing. Maxwell is extremely powerful, but it's far too complicated to setup out of the box. There needs to be better presets to get decent results with minimal setup. That's where Keyshot has it's edge. Take a look at how easy it is to setup and use Thea integrated inside of SketchUp, and how quick and brilliant the results are. If we had the same thing in FormZ, I'm not sure why anyone would continue to use RenderZone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdFNybJd2rU Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted November 19, 2015 Author Share Posted November 19, 2015 Hey John- While I agree that the results from Maxwell are comparable to Thea and V-Ray, the ease of use is missing. Maxwell is extremely powerful, but it's far too complicated to setup out of the box. There needs to be better presets to get decent results with minimal setup. That's where Keyshot has it's edge. Take a look at how easy it is to setup and use Thea integrated inside of SketchUp, and how quick and brilliant the results are. If we had the same thing in FormZ, I'm not sure why anyone would continue to use RenderZone. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SdFNybJd2rU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> We're actually pushing for a deeper integration. Thea for Sketchup isn't as full featured as Thea for C4D or Thea for 3ds Max. So what we're aiming for is Thea for Sketchup on Steroids!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Montoya Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 Nice! On a sidenote, I was trying to embed a YouTube video. Tech, are we able to do that on these forums? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted November 19, 2015 Author Share Posted November 19, 2015 Just copy paste the YouTube URL (not the html embed code) and the forum software will automatically create the embed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tech Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 Hi Justin, Yes, as Jon notes, we just pasted the full link into your into your post above... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Montoya Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 Weird... when I did that first, it only showed the hyperlink... Trying again for peace of mind... https://youtu.be/SdFNybJd2rU Edited: It's not showing up here on my end. Perhaps it's because of YouTubes new use of the //youtu.be/ address?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tech Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 You need to copy the FULL address from the Address bar... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Montoya Posted November 19, 2015 Share Posted November 19, 2015 Got it, thank you! Still strange that the other share link doesn't work the same way. I suspect that domain isn't in the Forum settings backend that automatically does that. Feel free to remove all these erroneous posts! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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