Rendering

Practice, read/watch tutorials... repeat.

I had no ability to render when I joined GrabCAD. I always wondered how people made the fancy pictures, and my models just had screenshots from SOLIDWORKS. If you check some of my early library models, they are still screenshots.

I found the SOLIDWORKS based rendering option very hard to use (it was Photoview 360, or Photoview?). I messed with it for a year, but it was not very fun since the results I got were rather terrible.

Then I tried Keyshot, and rendering is now more fun than building the models.

I'm not suggesting you use Keyshot. But, you should try demos of different rendering programs and find what works best for you and the types of models you work with.

Some rendering programs work faster with expensive CUDA core graphics cards. Other programs are CPU based and work fine on most PCs

I am a beginner level user of Autodesk Inventor. I have been trying to render some of our machines to use for marketing material using their rendering tools under "Environments". I understand most of the tools and can set-up a model to render how I want to, but no matter how long I let the render run, it always seems to come out as a crappy PNG image. Do any of you recommend a different software that I can pull in my existing models and render more effectively? Our models are very large and complicated systems of multiple machines.

Cory,

There are many rendering packages, all of them are capable of rendering good images, but you'll find the workflow easier, and even intuitive in some of them.

Maybe post a few of the items you have rendered and we can give some suggestions to improve the results. If the machines you are working on can't be shared, try rendering something from the library.

Everyone will recommend the rendering software they are most familiar with. The Question and Group section is full of such advice. The best thing to do is try 2-3 rendering programs for yourself, and see which is easiest to use.