Hi I’m trying to figure out if I’m the only person who uses Autodesk Alias and Keyshot.
The Alias importer is busted for me in both KS12 and KS13. (have an ongoing ticket with KS support) the issue is that surface normals and materials are not rendering properly and need to be manually edited after every time the file is saved and reopened.
Curious if anyone else out there uses Alias and KS and also has experienced an issue with surface normals or am I the only one. Or if you have no issues with the latest KS versions.
thanks
does an neutral format like IGES or similar work?
yes it does sometimes, but there are other issues using neutral formats, .IGES for example cannot recognize layers or shaders. and .STP will not recognize layer, or groups making files alot more complex and difficult to manage and require different workflows to optimize for KS.
Since the very 1st KS .wire importer worked fine until now.
THat’s odd, I use STP files all the time and they routinely come in with folders for parts. I have no idea how they create them, but the drafters are using ProE I think. I kniow they also can provide us with .prt and .asm files which all bring in folder structures.
Most likely the tree is being respected from ProE and 90% of your imported geometry is recognized as .step or .iges solids (.prt and .asm are solid parametric formats too). The Workflow in Alias is tedious to try and make things solid body just for KS export and it’s not parametric thus there is no inherent tree style grouping created in neutral formats.
AP214 .stp will respect color so one could group that way, and I do have the option to select respect “grouping” on export but it seems that the “grouping” in Alias is not recognized in any way in KS.
Even so the ap214 colors will create groups but will also remove all the geometry/layer names and layer hierarchy I was using to build the CAD in Alias, so now the export files need to be structured by “shaders” alone with obscure names and not shaders in layers with names assigned in the CAD… its just more tedious = more work = more time = annoying when rendering is just a slice of my job responsibilities. The .wire always imported fine since the creation of the software, its should still work.
One of the BIG advantages of a native file import (with correct settings checked) was that surfaces even though they were not solids or even connected to each other would come in as the same single part if they had the same shader applied and were on the same layer in Alias (not a folder with surfaces in it that are linked via material). In this manner complex geometry could be easily converted into a render KS file with like 5 layers (folders) that are each a part of the thing to be rendered and then maybe 10 shaders (parts) to assign materials to so copy and pasting materials from other files in the scene becomes very fast simple and easy as there is never any tree digging and there is no danger of the materials getting unlinked.
Simple files structures and a wide array of native NURBS file support with fast results like this are the entire reason to use KS.