I kn0w this is an old thread but I really want to weigh in and give my opinion on this situation.
Basically I want to back up imsannr on his experience.
What is impossible to believe is that almost a year has past since his post and the situation is still the same, with the possible exception to some welcome keyshot improvements.
I was really really excited before the release of bunkspeed shot because it would be able to take advantage of the cuda gpu rendering option. I have a mobo with tri x16 pcie slots, and with gtx 570 & 580 cards on ebay atm for $300-$400 it sounds like the perfect situation. Ultimately I really wanted to love bunkspeed’s offering.
But even though 10 months has past bunkspeed shot really isn’t up to handling complex models. Or as I have found even some complex shapes or challenging surfacing. Not to mention how slow it can be at importing them when it does work.
My experiance differs in that keyshot does have emissive materials that I have been using & I don’t find the interface harder, with the exception of their odd key combinations for viewport navigation and having to change settings on the realitime view tab in order to change them for the final render (ground reflections, detailed shadows, etc…).
Keyshot also now has, although I feel poorly implemented, 3d connextion support, that is a blessing.
Shot’s ability to import my catia files correctly is shocking, it alters the shape of some objects and flat out fails with some complex surfaces & large assemblies. This is a massively exaggerated problem as the imports take a very long time, you are given no real progress bar for the bulk of the import time other than a repeating animation saying loading. I have attempted this with stp & igs files with very little success.
If you do get your models into shot however, even on the now superseded GPUs I have available it is fantastic at rendering them. I do not believe the quality, except for some ground shadows, is any better than keyshot, but it does seem to allow better navigation of your model while applying materials. On my machines, with complex models, that can become a tedious process in keyshot.
I think that if shot can be made “MUCH” more reliable, allow flawless importing of STP or IGES files or even exporters for programs like catia & NX, show accurate progress on the importing process (That shouldn’t be that hard) and generally feel less klunky on average hardware, it would be killer. As it stands now though, keyshot gets the job done and shot doesn’t.
If those issues are resolved and the cloud solution comes way down in price I think that shot has the ability to be the best option as it offloads the hardware requirements. But thats a BIG “if”.
FYI I have been running
- Keyshot 2.3.1
- Bunkspeed Shot Pro 2011.3
On these two machines:
-
DIY Desktop
a. AMD x4 Black Edition
b. 8GB DDR2 PC2-6400
c. Quadro FX 4600
d. Geforce GTX 8800
e. Intel G2 SSD
f. Win7 x64 -
Hp 8730w Laptop
a. Core 2 Duo T9400
b. 4GB DDR2 800
c. Quadro FX 2700M
d. 7200RPM HDD
e. Win7 x64