[sdiy] Best program for photo realistic renders of synths?

[Danjel van Tijn / intellijel]

I want to start making photo-realistic renders of synth projects but I am
trying to choose which program is worth focusing my learning efforts on.

We do all our 3D CAD work in Fusion 360 (PCBs are in Altium) and all our
panel graphics in Adobe Illustrator.

One step that is really important for me is to be able to take my panel
graphic from illustrator and add them as decals to the 3D models. This
needs to be precise in scale/position and should be easy to do or else it
will be a real bottleneck for productivity.

If I import graphics to Fusion, it is a real pain to try and scale them to
the correct size and there is no option for 1:1 import. Fusion has very
poor tools for this; they only allow coarse, concentric scaling (unless you
manually try an enter scaling values but then you are just guessing) and it
is very slow. Also, Fusion does not allow the import of vector images.

I have taken a quick look at Blender and Rhino so far as alternatives.
Rhino allows for import of native Ilustrator files and will import at the
correct scale.
Blender will allow SVG import but not at the correct scale. The scaling too
is a bit easier to use than Fusion but it is still not ideal.

In terms of Blender vs Rhino,  it is difficult to know which one is worth
the time investment. Blender seems deeper in features, is free and has a
large support community. Rhino at least offers a one-time purchase option
that is not unreasonable and I like the interface better but the user
community seems a lot smaller and I need to understand the NURBS approach.
Also, a lot of people, whether they are using Blender or Rhino, seem to do
the final rendering in Keyshot (which is quite expensive).

Does anyone have experience with these or another program?  What would you
recommend?
I still need to make photo realistic models of UI elements like knobs and
switches and for this, I am probably always going to be more familiar with
the parametric cad modeling approach.

thanks!

Danjel
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