From CAD to Visualization with Onshape and KeyShot

Product renderings should do more than make a design visually appealing. They should communicate design intent, showcase real functionality, and help teams understand how a product will look and work before it’s built.

With Onshape, PTC’s cloud-native CAD and PDM system, designers and engineers can create 3D renderings and visualizations using the built-in Render Studio.

They also have easy access to partner applications from the Onshape App Store.

KeyShot, one such partner, is a visualization platform that expands the 3D rendering toolkit, enabling teams to create photorealistic visuals that inform design reviews, lead marketing efforts, and communicate intent to customers, executives, and manufacturing teams.

Transform CAD into Realistic Visualizations

After connecting to Onshape, users can browse design documents, search assemblies, and import models directly into KeyShot to create realistic visualizations.

Once in KeyShot, users can take advantage of several capabilities that help transform CAD models into static images, animations, and illustrations.

Play with Materials and Environments for Refined Imagery

KeyShot makes it easy to transform engineering geometry into photorealistic product imagery.

KeyShot’s extensive material library offers metals, plastics, transparent materials, emissive surfaces, and specialty finishes to achieve photorealism. To make things easier for designers, KeyShot’s material templates can automatically map predefined materials across entire assemblies. This dramatically reduces setup for designers working with design iterations and a variety of product configurations.

Beyond the model, KeyShot’s HDRI environments allow designers to place products in studio setups or real-world scenarios. From there, lighting is in the designer’s control, from controlling reflections, shadows, and overall mood to adjusting finishes such as anodization, translucency, and transparency.

Creating photorealistic imagery requires details that are true to reality. KeyShot provides the tools to add and tweak labels, logos, and other surface details such as edge treatments – all without requiring major modifications to the CAD model.

The result is a flexible visualization workflow that helps designers evaluate aesthetics, explore color, material, and finish options, and create accurate imagery long before a physical prototype exists.

Show Product Functionality with Animations and Illustrations

While static renderings help communicate appearance, animations and illustrations can communicate how a product works.

KeyShot’s Animation Wizard enables users to create motion studies, exploded views, assembly demonstrations, product showcases, and maintenance walkthroughs without requiring specialized animation expertise. Designers can animate assemblies, components, cameras, lighting, and scene transitions to highlight specific features or processes.

These animations can serve multiple audiences. For instance, manufacturing teams can create visual assembly instructions, engineering teams can demonstrate product functionality, and marketing teams can produce engaging product videos.

Additionally, KeyShot also includes illustration tools that emphasize structure and function rather than photorealism. Features such as transparency controls, outline rendering, and stylized model views help teams create documentation, training materials, and service instructions that are easier to understand than traditional CAD screenshots.

Together, these tools make it possible to communicate both what a product looks like and how it works using the same connected Onshape workflow.

Why Use KeyShot with Onshape?

While Render Studio and the upcoming AI Quick Render by Onshape Labs help users create compelling visuals directly within Onshape, KeyShot expands those possibilities with additional rendering, animation, and visualization capabilities.

KeyShot offers robust rendering workflows, animation tools, technical illustrations, extensive material libraries, and connected design updates that simplify collaboration between engineering, manufacturing, and marketing teams.

Stay Synced as Designs Evolve

Because Onshape is cloud-native, design data is always current and accessible. KeyShot connects directly to Onshape documents and assemblies, allowing users to pull in the latest CAD model while preserving assembly structure, part names, and metadata.

That connection remains active as designs change, allowing designers to update geometry in KeyShot without rebuilding the entire rendering project. This means materials, lighting setups, animations, camera positions, and scene configurations remain intact, reducing rework and helping visualization teams stay aligned with engineering.

Improve Collaboration Across Teams

Engineering, design, manufacturing, and marketing teams often need different views of the same product. Rendering becomes a powerful collaboration tool.

Engineers can run through design reviews and validate design intent through realistic visuals. Marketing teams can create customer-facing imagery. Manufacturing teams can use technical illustrations or animations to better understand assembly procedures.

Explore Visual Design Without Engineering Bottlenecks

Small visual adjustments often don’t require engineering changes.

In KeyShot, users can experiment with materials, labels, lighting, edge treatments, and environments without modifying the underlying CAD model. This flexibility enables designers and marketers to refine presentations and visuals independently while maintaining a link to engineering data.

Explore More Design Concepts with AI

KeyShot’s AI Shots feature helps designers quickly generate backgrounds, scene variations, and new visual contexts from simple prompts. Whether exploring different product presentations or creating marketing-ready imagery, AI can help accelerate visualization workflows and reduce manual scene setup.

AI-powered engineering tools are also becoming part of the broader Onshape ecosystem. Through the early-access program Onshape Labs, the soon-to-launch AI Quick Render can generate photorealistic renderings directly from parts, assemblies, or even sketches using natural language prompts. Users can refine lighting, materials, and composition through follow-up prompts, then save the results directly to their Onshape documents.

Together, AI Shots and Onshape Labs give product teams more ways to move from concept to communication faster, spending less time setting up visualizations and more time evaluating, refining, and sharing ideas.

Bring Designs to Life

Whether you’re designing consumer products, industrial equipment, electronics, medical devices, or custom prototypes, 3D renderings and visualizations help turn engineering data into visual stories that everyone can understand.

With KeyShot, product designers and prototyping teams can create realistic visuals, streamline collaboration, and keep pace with ever-changing designs without losing momentum.

KeyShot is a connected desktop tool available through the Onshape App Store. A free 14-day trial is offered to new KeyShot users.

After installing the application, users can connect KeyShot to their Onshape account, browse documents, import assemblies, and begin creating renderings immediately.