The app always gets you to 90-95% of the final image very quickly, but there’s usually a wait for certain effects to resolve. It’s also one of the things that make us think KeyShot would benefit from a de-noising solution, especially with some of its new materials being such render hogs. The end results are terrific, but the Scattering Medium can be one of the slowest elements to render, so use it with caution (or a lot of CPU cores).

You can render OpenVDB files or simply apply it to a mesh for more abstract imagery. The geometry nodes can be used to create things like metallic flakes or bubbles within an existing meshĪnother important addition is the Scattering Medium, which can be used for rendering smoke and fog, and works nicely with the new Spotlight to create visible light rays. You can, of course, use these nodes on their own for strange and dramatic results, such as a mesh made entirely of flakes or tiny spheres. The Bubbles node works with a single material to add realistic bubbles, which is ideal for making fizzy drinks, clear gels, that kind of thing. This lets you create glass or plastics with sparkling metal flakes or spherical beads inside. To use the Flakes node, ideally you should duplicate your mesh then apply the geometry node to one, and a transparent material to the other. It’s not instant – there’s a bit of calculation time while KeyShot generates the necessary geometry, but once done, there’s seemingly no real hit on navigation or render times.

KeyShot’s implementation is excellent, producing really fine levels of displacement. Displacement works similarly to most renderers, using a greyscale texture to generate surface detail that would be difficult to model or sculpt.

The key feature for 3D generalists will be the new geometry node types, which add Displacement, Flakes and Bubbles. Version 8 represents one of the biggest updates in the software's history, bringing a range of new tools, materials and shaders to make your renders more varied and more realistic than ever. We’ve watched with interest how KeyShot has evolved since first looking at version 3 back in 2012.

Keyshot 8 pro