Our new Best Practices channel is a place to share advice and ask questions.
To kick things off, why don’t you share your best piece of advice, your biggest question, or your favorite KeyShot tip? We’ll choose a few to feature as challenges or even as future Quick Tips!
I’ve been thinking of doing some educational material on some more advanced Keyshot practices (time permitting), as well as post-production techniques, production pipeline, etc. for users trying to tackle larger projects and more complicated workflows. Here’s a list of a few topics I’ve considered covering, and would love any ideas the community might have to add to it:
Drawing a blank but there are plenty more ideas haha…
Here’s a list of a few topics I’ve considered covering and would love any ideas the community might have to add to it:
I learned a lot from experiments and the Keyshot channel and Will Gibbons.
I think Gemstone material can be more realistic and percise. It will make Keyshot more popular for jewelry industry
-Advanced Material graph skills
I covered the basics, but I was always looking for a tutorial where someone explained how to import your own textures or from Polligon/ DImensiva/Plyhaven and costumize them in the material graph.
Hi everybody,
A practice that I would like to contribute that has become an essential while I do any kind of rendering is going to be the Image Styles tab and changing it from “Basic” to either “Low Contrast” or my favorite “High Contrast”. It adds a bit more depth, vibrance and photorealism to the overall render. I have shared renders that I am currently working on for my Instagram (@vibhorjainn). One is without the use of Image Styles i.e. leaving it on Basic. The second image, however, is the High Contrast Photographic Image Style.
I hope my post helped you discover something new! 
Best advice: while rendering for a catalog or E-commerce, uniformity is sometimes more important than flashy reflections and incredible detail. Substituting metals for plastics for instance can help significantly with cohesiveness.
Nicee, That’s render is a beauty
i would love to really master the lignthing in keyshot, it´s always that area that i feel that i can improve more
Recently I started a new job and I need to make a lot of renderings.
It can be problematic when you add a large number of renders to the queue (I mean 10 jobs with more than 100 shots each). And I’m not good at scripting so I recorded steps to start renders with the Windows step recorder. This way the PC can render all night long.
I usually render interiors which consists of a quite large number of floorplans (Caravans) where colors are similar in all of them but with different interiors such as beds, cabinets and bathroom. Also the exteriors follow a similar pattern, same colors but different sizes of caravans and windows etc.
To make my workflow faster I’ve made two folders for materials, one for interiors and one for exteriors, where I’ve put all the materials I use in that scenario, both existing materials and custom ones, and named them to be in the order that I want to use them. That way I can just open a new scene, take the first material in the correct folder and apply that material to all the parts that should be in that material. Then the next material in the folder, and so on.
It has helped me speed up my work quite a bit since I get more structure than I did before where I just took a material and put it here and there, saw that I needed another material for some parts, then realized that I needed the first material on more places. Then kept doing so until the scene was eventually done, and more often than not I had forgotten some small parts that I didn’t see before the renderings were already done. Now I’m used to taking every single material in a specific order until I’m completely finished with it, and it makes for a smoother workflow.
So I guess that’s my tip, if you frequently work with similar projects where you have to start over from scratch on each scene it can really help to organize your materials in different folders. It’s probably not a bad idea in any case if you have a lot of custom materials.
I would love to see so,e more tips and tricks with displacement if anyone would care to share.
Tip: Watch Will Gibbons video use on studios
Question: How do you use the material graph to make scratched up materials like a skateboard?
@arnav.g I’ll let more experienced users than me handle your question about the material graph, but have you tried 3D paint? It’s a new feature designed to help achieve a realistic weathered look. There’s a challenge on it right now in the Learn with KeyShot channel in case you want to check it out!
Hey, as Melissa pointed out, 3D paint is a good option.
But what I usually do is use “Labels”. Using the Opacity node on materials with black and white grunge maps to add small or large details like scratches and spots. Hope this helps!
Hello,
I am new to KeyShot.
The first useful thing that I discovered when using Keyshot is that it is very convenient to use the 3D manipulator (from 3Dconnection) to move or rotate objects. I use such a manipulator in my daily work with Solidworks. It was amazing to me that Keyshot found it without any additional settings.
All great recommendations! You can also use the texture maps that Vibhor mentioned to drive your materials bump and/or roughness. That tends to add another layer of depth to weathering. I tend to throw in some scratch and spot textures from the textures menu as well, the procedural textures give you a significant amount of control over how your textures appear.
Keyshot is already very precise. Have you tried using complex IOR or NK data? There are data files for most gemstones, thin film coatings, metals, plastics, glass etc. There are a lot here
https://github.com/ulfgri/nk
but they will need tidying up in Excel and saving as either .NK or .IOR
Failing that get trials for Maxwell, Bella Render or Indigo all of which include some NK or IOR data in the installation. Maxwell has IOR files for gemstones in its application directory.
I think realistic material can be more realistic and precise. It will make Keyshot more popular for 3d Product industry
Advanced RealCloth tips
