Release: KeyShot 10.2

KeyShot 10.2 has been released. There is one important new feature that may interest those who have been trying to port over a Genesis figure to render in KeyShot. There’s a new Mesh Simplification tool. It appears to be all or nothing, though. Its simple UI suggests you can’t crunch just the mesh in the body under the clothes, while leaving neck and face and hands untouched. Unless perhaps you still have well-named mesh layers inside KeyShot.

For selective mesh reduction you would ideally need the official Decimator plugin inside DAZ Studio before export, and that plugin is still at $100 on the DAZ Store.

Those taking posed and dressed Genesis 8 figures over to Poser (for the comic-book line-art and sketch features, not for photoreal) will want the Automatic OBJ Exporter script set and the $50 Atangeo Balancer, to speed the process and make the figure wieldy in Poser. Atangeo does a very good job, is easy to use, and is far more stable than Meshlab. The downside there is no re-pose-ability. The result is a static .OBJ figure, but at least after decimation it doesn’t weigh umpteen gigabytes.

I have not been able to test it yet, but apparently KeyShot 10.x has fixed the ‘butterfly-wing eyelashes’ problem on DAZ figure imports. The problem was previously caused by lack of support for transparency maps, but is now said to be fixed.

Those trying to take Genesis to KeyShot for photoreal may also want the Realistic Skin Shader for Keyshot. Though it’s probably now a lot less hassle just to stick with iRay, now that iRay has seen a number of very major speed-boosts over the last few years.