Earlier this week, Luxion released its latest version of their flagship product, Keyshot 8. (Try out a demo or buy the latest here.)





I had the pleasure of being invited to participate in Alpha & Beta testing of the software to help discover bugs and issues as well as test out some of the new powerful features they’ve added including but not limited to;

Image Styles with Photographic Mode for Tone Mapping

Frontplate & Background image options

Bloom Threshold

Cutaway Shader w/ Material Caps

New Liquid Interaction w/ Nested Dielectrics

Multi-Layer Optics Shader

Scattering Medium Shader

Ability to map density textures and support for OpenVDB

Displacement Mapping

Geometry Scatter Shaders; Flakes & Bubbles

Configurator and Viewer Improvements

Other workflow and usability performance enhancements

I’m very excited about most of these new features, especially in the liquid interaction and geometry shaders, as those will have a big impact on my day to day work. It’s very obvious to me that this update was to entice the creative and artistic side to the user’s interaction, whereas, Keyshot 7 definitely appealed to the workflow and user interface side of things.

Luxion also held a closed competition for Beta testers to push for the best image and animations showcasing the new features. I participated with two entries, (Seen below) and the Luxion team awarded me with a First Place prize for the Beer Mug. I modeled all of the parts in Blender, and imported them into KS8 for the composition, lighting, shading and rendering. I utilized a few of the new features including displacement, bubble scatter, openVDB support, and definitely the new nested dielectrics approach for the liquid in the glass interaction.





