Means of viewing and interacting with highly rendered models?

I’m interested in finding a way of viewing my cad models, highly rendered but still being able to 3d rotate them at will.

The closest thing I can find to what I need is a video render, the disadvantage of this is you can’t rotate/zoom at will and so this is no good for me.

I don’t need to be able to edit them once they are in this state so I might even need a different type of software??

Not too sure where to start, any nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks! :slight_smile:

P.S (Just like Irhino 3d pretty much, except rendered to a very high quality)

Hi @JulesJewels

CAD models of…? From your screen name I’m guessing jewelry, so it might be worth taking a look at Keyshot. The newest version has a presentation mode (and also a stand-alone viewer - free) that will do beautiful renderings in seconds (depending on the complexity of the model, materials and the power of your computer etc.) and is fully interactive, so you can rotate and zoom, change material configurations etc. But grab the trail version and give it a go. Alternatively, take a look at Enscape3D, which is more aimed at architecture, but might suit you. Or maybe Rhino 6 and the build-in Cycles engine (aka “Raytraced” view mode) is enough for you?

HTH, Jakob

Thanks Normand!

Yeah you guessed right, I specialise in CAD for jewellery. I’ve taken a look at keyshot viewer and that’s pretty much on the money what I’m looking for.

The only drawback is that each time the camera is moved the piece needs to be re-rendered. and so viewing is not as fluid as I would need it to be.

I think I need some sort of gaming engine to achieve this? I would be happy to compromise on the quality of render if that’s what it would take.

Is this something you know about? Or have I gone too far off topic?

Thanks again!

So first of all - I don’t have any experience with jewellery modelling/rendering industry, but here’s my five cents.

It seems that you are looking for some sort of viewer, that would display models with pre-baked lighting. These things exist, but they focus is mostly on things like baked global illumination etc.

Since I expect a quality jewellery rendering depands mostly on reflections and refractions, which are basically impossible to pre-render in a proper way, I think Keyshot will be your best bet, since it’s a software tailored specifically for the purpose of real-time product renders.

Hi @JulesJewels

As mentioned by @ondrej-vesely, jewelry without proper reflections/refractions will likely look fairly bland and boring. Keyshot actually has an add-on called Keyshot XR, where you pre-render 360° turntable renderings (sort of what you sometimes see at webshops) and can view them either locally, on phone/tablet or embedded on a webpage. The turntables can include multiple heights, so you can basically render a full “tumble”, although it’s a lot of renderings - eg. 20 steps from 10 different heights comes to a total of 200 renderings, which is a lot, if we’re talking full HD or 4K - but it looks great. Files are quite large but again: it looks great!
Read more at www.keyshot.com/xr
And see a few examples at (look to the right side bar):
https://www.lino.de/keyshotxr+M52087573ab0.html
The hair dryer has views from multiple heights, and allows for a true “tumble”.
Since this is static renderings in an interactive package, there is no chance of degredation on slow computers, graphics card incompatibility etc.

HTH, Jakob

You could Enscape give a try. Also you can export your model as exe and send to your client. Materials are quite limited, but you get:

  • metals (clear to soft)
  • plastics
  • bump effects
  • glass (colored, frosted)
  • emissive

Maybe you need to find a creative solution for stones, maybe a textured emitters within a glass stone or something like this.

You could use a soft blurry HDRI as background environment. Here a product design test done some weeks before:

https://forum.enscape3d.com/index.php?thread/552-product-design/&postID=2698&highlight=product%2Bdesign#post2698

Here a simple test per Enscape. Since we have a lot of reflections the used HDRI environment is the key.
(Model is scaled by factor 10 to get it working with the typical architecture use scale of Enscape)