Er, wow. How did you do that?!
I have just been playing with Keyshot, which is the only piece of software that has done what I wanted, namely load a model and immediately present me with a semi-rendered model with default lighting that looks OK and with dialogs that make sense to the man-in-the street as opposed to rendering experts. The issues I have so far are that the rendering is not as good as what I have managed to grudgingly dig out of Kerkythea and for $1,000 I need to be sure before I make a decision. On the other hand, I can't even work out how to move the ground plane in Kerkythea and my model is sitting stubbornly half-above, half-below the ground plane. Kerkythea is no Panacea.
Maxwell Render and Octane look impressive but are way too complex for somebody like me. If I can't mouse around and work out how something operates in a few minutes then for a casual user it's not worth it. The process for inserting models in Octane was so well-hidden I had to watch a video to find out how to do it. One for the enthusiasts I think, though I will keep an eye on it.
I was going to end on a huffy note and bitch and moan about the lack of decent rendering software for amateurs, but on reflection (cough) it is perhaps not surprising. For example, the only inexpensive and quick modeller I have yet found is MoI. Why? Perhaps there is no market because normal users vaguely understand that 3D is "hard" and expensive. Thus MoI is basically forging a new market for itself and that's probably a lonely and worrying place to be for a developer at times, though rewarding as well. In the same fashion, there are many free or cheap renderers but none seem to be simple to use for people like myself who, in essence, simply want a studio or softbox environment as a background to a central prop rather than photo-realism. Those renderers that do have this functionality seem to be fairly expensive and thus need a certain level of commitment, so the market for them doesn't expand.
I would say there's a niche in the market here for cheap, straightforward rendering. If we could clone Michael then we could put Michael2 to work on a rendering equivalent to MoI. After all, that's probably the way forward isn't it? 3D representations of the world are surely going to be a bigger part of our lives in 10 years and past experience with word processors, spreadsheets and databases suggests that graceful and useful dumbing down is a necessity for a larger market.
In the meantime, I continue my search...
Dan
PS the attached is not a rendered Keyshot image but is from the preview window. However, renders also display these slightly angular spheres, which suggests to me that I have one of the settings wrong... In Kerkythea I get nice round spheres, but embedded in the ground :-)