Desktop Engineering Editors Pick of the Week
Mar 25, 2014
The article excerpted here, “Editor’s Pick: IronCAD Integrates Photorealistic Rendering” by Anthony J. Lockwood, originally appeared in Digital Engineering.
The people at IronCAD seem relentless in their pursuit to make their integrated IronCAD 3D/2D Design Collaboration Suite more productive and ever more ready for big-time collaboration. Over the past few years, for example, they’ve expanded IronCAD’s collaboration capabilities with integrations for GrabCAD for managing, viewing and sharing CAD files in the cloud, Cadenas PARTsolutions for creating digital catalogs and Traceparts for libraries of downloadable CAD models and supplier catalogs. And now, we have IronCAD integrating with the KeyShot photorealistic renderer from Luxion. This is an interesting development on a number of levels. Here are two.
First, there’s the rendering itself. Just a few years back photorealistic rendering was generally well received as a cool thing that design engineers could live without. You know, like how cellphones were once thought of: Nice but not worth the expense. Besides, you had to stop, export your image, fire up the renderer, fool around with the image then idle as you let the renderer cure your image awhile — all at the expense of actual design work, which the suits were bugging you for. If there were an ECO, you got to do it all again. Miserable stuff like that gave you ample excuse to pass on rendering.
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