thanks eric,

i sense you can feel my pain. i can't wait to switch as well. thanks for the workflow advice. much appreciated. i have an old license of keyshot and that has served me well. i tried simlab composer due to Pilou's posts. it's nice for rendering but doesn't do toon shading. at least the last time i tried it. so i have been sticking with keyshot. but at some point i'll have to find something new i imagine. i can't switch to any gpu based rendering software because i'm on a laptop with amd apu. the toon shading is nice because you can render a frame fast so it makes animations doable for me. but i'm pretty much done having to render anything so i'm not worried about that aspect of things. i was surprised how much of a computer load rendering is. i can do cfd and fea with no problem on the laptop but rendering takes forever. i spent some time with keyshot settings to be able to get a half decent render in a resonable amount of time.

thanks co3darts,

i will look into meshmixer. something that can smooth out an stl file and turn it into a step file might save me a lot of work. i wouldn't have to rebuild the model in cad.

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i had one thought too. the fea software i used to use gave inertial properties. the one i'm using now didn't the last time i checked. but they changed solvers. so i'll look again. i might be able to find them there. the only thing with fea mass properties is they are always a little off due to mesh error. so if i can find them in cad that would be ideal.