I just downloaded Blender and have been playing with it for a couple hours. The “Cycles Renderer” that they have packaged in is amazing. Thanks moczys for mentioning. You are correct that .STL seems like the only way to import Solidworks unfortunately … but then again, Keyshot was never too good at accepting any model changes after importing anyway!
I remember playing around with Vray a few years ago, and you could only see how your scene looked like by hitting “render.” Like Keyshot, there is a mode here in blender that lets you move your camera and objets while seeing the rendering preview update real-time.
This was a good tutorial for the Cycles render mode, done in about 25 minutes, including modeling:
