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

[Mike Beauchamp]

On 10/31/22 1:54 PM, Danjel van Tijn / intellijel wrote:
> Let's say I had a 3D model of an enclosure in Fusion, I want to take the 
> 2D graphics file from Illustrator that contains the equivalent of a 
> silkscreen image (text and lines) and then add that as a "decal" to the 
> 3D model.
> 
> For Eurorack module modeling, this is something I am going to need to do 
> a lot and so I really want to choose a program for which this would be 
> painless.   Fusion360 seems to have some bugs/quirks in this respect.
> 
> Blender may work but images are not importing at their original scale 
> and I would love to avoid the hassle or re-sizing and re-positioning 
> every time I decide t a change to the original vector file.


Rhino allows "decals", but as far as I know (at least version 6) they 
are only raster-based not vector. Also, the scaling is ambiguous, you 
chose the size when you assign the decal by snapping it to the edges of 
a surface for example.. the aspect ratio can be locked.

You can make changes to the decal just by overwriting the file you 
imported and it will update, keeping your intended scale etc.

Rhino doesn't make photorealistic renders though.. everybody I know 
doing that uses Blender and either designing right in Blender or 
importing their CAD files and assigning textures and all that fun stuff 
within Blender. A friend that works in the film industry says Blender is 
pretty much an industry standard for that and the renders I've seen are 
amazing.

I'd also imagine every CAD program works in a similar way with decals 
and scaling.. getting a 1:1 decal should be as simple as snapping it to 
an object of the target size.

Best of luck,

Mike