We’ve posted the animation and renderings of Simon Williamson in the past and are delighted to feature him as this month’s featured Customer Spotlight. Simon teaches at the Wentworth Institute of Technology Department of Industrial Design in Boston. Many are happy to have been under his instruction and we are just as happy he shared more about his past, his passion, his process and why he uses KeyShot.
Simon Williamson
Simon came across KeyShot when searching for a rendering package to compliment the Industrial Design CAD progression at Wentworth. ”It involved testing and trying many different packages. Ultimately, I was sold on the speed of the set up, the real-time render window, the stability, as well as the reliability and intricacy of the results.
With KeyShot, you can begin on an elementary level and progress rapidly, resulting with very sophisticated effects. Also, it takes an awful lot of model complexity to bog down KeyShot, (whereas other programs get overwhelmed with less detail, much more easily); it holds up so well it’s downright phenomenal. And, since we needed a package that would help the students create fabulous images of their designs, and not get them frustrated or stifled by (getting in the way of) the complexity of the interface, KeyShot more than fit the bill and has proven to be a real winner!”
“The class I teach is CAD and there was no time for self learning the rendering component. KeyShot was perfectly suited to the (job) class: painless to pick up; simple to set up; and a wonderful aid to creating beautiful, visual output with extraordinary results. As with any design professionals, the students needed to focus on the process of designing products rather than obsess over the workings of a rendering tool. In other words, the program needed to support the agenda and not get in the way of their creative process. KeyShot does just that, and, so much more.”
Along with that, he has found KeyShot to be a tremendous value in terms of saving time setting up the image, due to the simplicity of the procedural workflows. “Personally, after dragging the model into the live preview frame and applying some standard materials and textures, and deciding on the environment, most of the work is already done.
Passing this on to the students becomes very straight forward. The next stage of getting them excited about the possibilities of a quality render is a natural outcome. It’s the “Pow” factor. Exploiting all that KeyShot has to offer, it’s then time to go deeper with the final adjustments, like material and environment creation and editing, camera settings and lens effects. We have a massive, 24 CPU Mac – and I love to test the possibilities, set up very complex images, pump up the pixels, set the max time to multiple days and let it go. Then, when I come back after a long weekend, it’s like magic, the “Pow!””
