Rendering CAD files?

[AuthenticDanger]

How does everyone render CAD files so that they look super sexy?

This is what Fusion 360 kicks out:


I'd like to add lighting and better materials to make it really pop. Ideas?

[xtrafrood]

Why post this in off topic?

[xtrafrood]

Cool, the thread was moved. I'm not the best to accurately describe the how but a good starting point is photography. A decent understanding of lighting and composition can make a difference.

[Leslieann]

A lot depends on your cad program and how you position the view, not every cad program can do materials rendering, some have just generic lighting.

Remembers these are primarily engineering tools, if you want something geared towards looks, you would want to load this up into a program more designed for it such as 3d Studio Max.

[AuthenticDanger]

Why post this in off topic?

It was late and I goofed.

A lot depends on your cad program and how you position the view, not every cad program can do materials rendering, some have just generic lighting.

Remembers these are primarily engineering tools, if you want something geared towards looks, you would want to load this up into a program more designed for it such as 3d Studio Max.

I want to know what non-CAD program people recommend for taking cad files and rendering them to look snazzy. I'm open to learning new software (self taught myself Fusion 360 in 6-8 hours to make a multilayer case) but I don't want to invest a ton of time in 1 3D modeling program to find out it's better/easier to use another.

[Pwner]

Why post this in off topic?

It was late and I goofed.

A lot depends on your cad program and how you position the view, not every cad program can do materials rendering, some have just generic lighting.

Remembers these are primarily engineering tools, if you want something geared towards looks, you would want to load this up into a program more designed for it such as 3d Studio Max.

I want to know what non-CAD program people recommend for taking cad files and rendering them to look snazzy. I'm open to learning new software (self taught myself Fusion 360 in 6-8 hours to make a multilayer case) but I don't want to invest a ton of time in 1 3D modeling program to find out it's better/easier to use another.

I would honestly just say to stick with Fusion for your rendering as well.  I'm no expert but I feel like you can do some pretty nice renders just using the built in rendering tool.  Take a look at my Instagram linked in my sig for my personal keyboard related stuff.  If you want any help or tips or anything feel free to shoot me a PM.

[Rodde]

I have no experience with this, but I've been told some people use Simlab (sp?) as the next step.

[sinusoid]

In Fusion select the bodies you want to export, right click them and export to STL.

Now you can import these files into any 3d package suited for rendering.
I suggest using Blender to do the rendering. It works with two free rendering engines, built-in Cycles and external Luxrender. I think commercial packages integrate with it too, but never needed to use them. Anyway, both are epic awesome and worth your time. I suggest going with Cycles for the beginning, it's built in and you won't have to set up a lot of stuff. Here, have a gallery of Cycles stuff:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?27-Forum-Gallery

You'll have to chew through Blender's interface. Defaults are going to be a PITA if you like Fusion. There's plenty of intro tutorials on youtube, so you should be fine if you persist. The thing that gets me pissed most is that Fusion uses middle mouse button for drag, + shift to rotate, and Blender does the exact opposite. In both cases it makes perfect sense due to nature of both tools. If Fusion is your dominant tool, and it bothers you, rebind Blender.

You're gonna have a heavily triangulated and maybe messy mesh from Fusion. You don't have to texture it. Usually for industrial object rendering you can get away with using materials without image textures. You design them in Cycles using nodes. Then you do compositing, render passes, photoshop... Depends on your determination really. There are tutorials for all of this stuff on youtube, avoid the longer ones for a start, you should be cranking out renders in two or three hours, maybe less.

Oh, and if you're running out of Fusion "grace period", back up your files locally. Anecdotal, and did not check myself, but a friend said their grace period didn't get extended, and afterwards they could only view and export stuff to STL from their cloud storage.

edit:
linking to blenderartists attachment directly, what can go wrong -_-

full thread here:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?398207-Wet-Shoes-%96-Realistic-Lighting-in-Blender