SolidSmack reviews the new edition of KeyShot, Keyshot 2
Read the full review from Solidsmack.com here
or the conclusion below:
The Smack
I’ve been wanting to do this review for a long time. KeyShot is great fun to use and is in no way a daunting program to start up and mess around with. It improves on Hypershot and KeyShot 1.9 quite substantially and if the upcoming features like GPU usage and sub-surface ray tracing are any sign, 2.1 and future releases are going to keep making it easy to get a brilliant rendering. One area I’d personally like to see more options is in lighting; providing more control over indirect lighting and environment shadows. Even still, with the right amount of tweaking, the results can be phenomenal.
If you’re a SolidWorks user and using SolidWorks Standard edition which doesn’t come with the Photoview360 rendering product, KeyShot will replace and even exceed some of the PV360 current capabilities, especially by giving you the option of importing other file formats besides SolidWorks. Rhino users will especially rejoice for it 3DM import capability and ease of use of other Rhino rendering plug-ins. Even better, if you’re a old Hypershot user, you can still import your scenes as KeyShot still used the same BIP extension.
Here’s what your decision to go with KeyShot may come down to. Price. Keyshot 2 runs $995 (upgrade from Hypershot/KeyShot 1.9 is $395) and the Pro version for high-resolution export comes in at $1995 (upgrade from Hypershot/KeyShot Pro 1.9 is $1095). For just rendering that may seem high. You can get plug-ins and add-ons to other 3D software that are the same price or less. The value KeyShot is banking on is how easy it is to get good renderings. If you’re looking for that KeyShot is excellent. In fact, I’d have it in design arsenal, just because of that. For the same price though, you can upgrade to SolidWorks professional if your a SolidWorks users. Rhino users can download VSR Realtime rendering for free and then there’s modo that for the same $995 gives you sculpting, modeling, rendering and animation. You can’t beat that, but you’ll also have a much steeper learning curve. It all depends on the amount of set-up you want to do and products you use.
With KeyShot, you get rendering, pure and simple rendering. No animation, although there are hints it’s coming. So for now, if you want a rendering program that takes little time to get familiar with, giving you more time to create detailed models and killer photo-realistic images, I’ve gotta say, KeyShot, all the way