thanks guys. so many options. so far i ruled out simlab composer. i tried it out again today and not gonna work for me unfortunately.

updates:

i ended up trying a few of the suggestions. however, they didn't work out for various reasons.

i appreciate all the suggestions. i looked on various websites and did searches before i posted. there are a ton of rendering programs but nothing seems to be as close to keyshot as i would like. a lot of them are more for architecture or for animation of movies. not for simple mcad rendering and animation.

i tried keyshot 9.2 demo. it turned out there are still gui problems. some stuff wasn't showing up that was supposed to be. then all kinds of problems with docking enable.