Luxion KeyShot Pro
Version 2024.3 (13.2.1.1) · Luxion · Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit) · ranked #177 in the library
Product rendering that updates as you drag, with physically accurate materials and lighting that make a CAD model look like a photograph of a manufactured object rather than a picture of a computer model.
Read the installation section below before you start. The order of the steps matters on this release.
About this release
Overview
KeyShot exists because most people who need a beautiful image of a product are engineers and industrial designers, not rendering specialists. Import the model, drag a material onto a part, drag an environment into the scene, and the viewport is already showing the finished result with real ray traced light. There are no render settings to configure before you can see anything, no light rigs to build by hand, and no separate preview and final quality paths that disagree with each other.
The material system is where the accuracy comes from. Everything is physically based and measured rather than approximated: brushed and anodised metals with correct anisotropy, plastics with real subsurface behaviour, glass and liquids with proper refraction and dispersion, painted finishes with a separate clearcoat layer, woven fabrics, and translucent materials that scatter light the way the real thing does. Labels and textures project onto curved surfaces without manual unwrapping, and a material graph is available when a finish needs to be built rather than picked.
Lighting is handled through image based environments. An HDRI wraps the scene and provides both the illumination and the reflections, and the HDRI editor lets you add, move, resize and colour individual light pins directly in the render, watching the highlight travel across the product as you drag. On top of that sits animation with turntables, part explosions and camera moves, plus a studio system that stores model sets, environments, cameras and image settings as combinations so a whole family of shots is rendered in one queue.
What it does
Feature breakdown
Real time ray traced viewport
The working view is the render. Move a part, swap a material or drag a light and the image resolves progressively without switching to a separate preview mode.
Physically based material library
Hundreds of measured materials covering metals, plastics, glass, liquids, paints, fabrics, wood, stone and translucent finishes, applied by dragging them onto geometry.
HDRI environment editor with light pins
Add and move individual lights inside the environment, adjusting size, colour, brightness and falloff while watching the reflection move on the product in real time.
Material graph for complex finishes
Build layered finishes as a node graph with textures, mappings, geometry effects and blends when the library preset is not quite the finish you need.
Animation and turntables
Camera moves, part translations and rotations, explosions and turntables on a timeline, rendered out as frames or a movie file with motion blur.
Wide CAD import support
Reads the common native and neutral formats including STEP, IGES, OBJ, FBX, Alembic and the major mechanical formats, keeping part structure and named groups intact for material assignment.
Changed in this build
Version 2024.3 (13.2.1.1)
- GPU rendering path improved, with better memory handling on scenes that previously exceeded card capacity and fell back to the processor.
- Material graph editor rebuilt with a faster canvas and clearer node grouping on large finish networks.
- HDRI editor pin controls refined, with per-pin masking so a highlight can be shaped without affecting the rest of the environment.
- Faster import and tessellation on large assemblies, particularly those with many small fastener parts.
- Render queue now continues past a failed job and reports it at the end rather than stopping the whole batch.
Installation
Follow these in order
- Disconnect from the network before starting.
- Extract the archive to a local drive with at least 30 GB free.
- Disable real time protection for the whole process.
- Run the installer as administrator and include the material, environment and texture libraries when prompted.
- Let the library installation finish, it runs after the application and takes longer than the program itself.
- Launch KeyShot, confirm the title bar reports the Pro edition, then re-enable protection.
Release notes
From whoever packed it
- The resource libraries are separate from the application. If materials appear as grey placeholders, point the folder locations at the installed library in preferences.
- GPU mode needs a recent driver more than it needs a fast card. Update the driver before deciding the GPU path is broken.
- Do not let it check for updates. The update replaces the activated components and reverts the application to a watermarked output mode.
System requirements
Minimum and recommended
| Operating system | Windows 10 version 22H2 or Windows 11, 64-bit only |
|---|---|
| Processor | Any modern multicore Intel or AMD. Render times scale almost linearly with core count |
| Memory | 16 GB minimum, 32 GB recommended, 64 GB for large assemblies with high resolution textures |
| Graphics | For GPU rendering an NVIDIA card with 8 GB VRAM or more and a current driver. CPU rendering works on any GPU |
| Storage | 25 GB of free space for the application and the full material and environment library |
Questions about this release
Answered before you ask
- Does it read my CAD files directly?
- The common neutral formats and most major native mechanical formats import directly with part structure preserved. Very unusual formats need a STEP export first.
- Is GPU rendering required?
- No. It renders on the processor perfectly well, and on a machine with many cores the difference is smaller than people expect.
- What does the Pro edition add?
- Animation, the studio system for batching shot combinations, the material graph, and the higher output resolutions. The lower tier stops short of all of those.
Download
Pick a mirror