Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 20, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
That Luxion attaches great importance to making rendering and animation as simple and fast as possible is nothing new. With its stand-alone rendering and animation software KeyShot, the company took a big step towards the visualisation industry. Objects from a wide variety of packages can be imported easily and prepared through to the finished image. With Keylight Verion 3.1, however, it steps things up considerably once again in terms of speed, flexibility and, above all, quality.
It will not only be studios responsible for automotive visualisation that are pleased to hear that the metallic paint can now also depict proper metallic flakes. As if that were not enough, their size and visibility can also be changed at will.
Material templates have also been integrated. When objects are imported into the program, special materials that follow a certain naming convention can be assigned straight away. One example would be metallic paint on all parts that contain Metallic in their name.
There was also an innovation in the placement of textures on objects. The manipulator has now been placed at the centre of the projection, making certain textures even easier to position. Small but useful is the possibility that groups of animations can now also be selected among the animations. This allows several animations to be deleted or changed at the touch of a button.
The new HDR editor allows existing light sources to be intensified and colour nuances and saturation to be changed in real time. Network rendering has been implemented so that rendering can be carried out even faster.
The program is available at www.keyshot.com
