The finished part, as a picture.

Browse the library by material or by colour, search it, and drag a finish onto a part or onto one face. Paints in matte and silk, metallic paint with flakes and a clear coat, metals raw, polished, machined, turned or scratched, anodised aluminium, plastics and rubber, wood and stone, glass that refracts and frosts, and a line-drawing style for illustrations.

• Edit any finish: colour, roughness, metal, clear coat, brushed direction and angle.
• Save your own finishes to a library that an upgrade keeps, or pass one to a colleague as a single .tfmaterial file, images inside.
• Save several finish versions of one part as named setups, and switch between them for a colour study.

Add colour, roughness and normal maps from a built-in matching set (wood, stone, fabric, metal and more) or from your own PNG or JPEG pictures. Tile sizes are in millimetres, so grain on a 20 mm sample and on a 500 mm panel can each look right. Project them as a box, a plane or a cylinder, or use the mesh’s own texture coordinates, and place a decal with its own size, position and turn.

A scan has no CAD faces, and a grip or a painted band rarely follows one. Mark a named region with a brush, a lasso, a polygon, an angle fill that grows over the surface, a straight line or an exact plane, and give it its own finish, without cutting the geometry. Up to 32 regions on a part.

Start from a soft, a white catalogue or a dark studio, then turn the lighting round the part and set its intensity and softness. Add softbox lights for a shaped reflection, or light the part with a panorama picture of your own.

• Exposure, brightness, contrast and highlight colour, with a Filmic or Neutral look.
• Save the studio and use it again, so a whole product range is lit the same way.

Put the part in front of the studio’s own background, a colour, a gradient, a picture or the lighting panorama, or save a PNG with a transparent background for a brochure. Ground and ground shadows are separate switches; Place on ground seats the part, and moving or turning it for the picture leaves the model where it is.

Turn, tilt and zoom with the mouse as everywhere in Tesselform, or type the angles. Choose perspective for a photograph or orthographic to compare shapes, add depth of field with a focus point, and show composition guides that never appear in the picture. Save a view by name and render the same angle again after any change.

Choose a size (product, HD, Full HD, QHD, 4K, square, portrait, A4 or A5, or any size from 32 to 4,096 pixels a side) and a quality: Draft, Good or Best, or 8 to 512 samples of your own. Render image saves every finished picture as a new PNG, so earlier ones stay as they were.

• A detail preview renders one small area at the final quality, to check a reflection or a texture before the whole picture.
• Render every saved camera view in one batch.
• Results keeps the recent pictures with thumbnails; compare two side by side, open the folder or copy one to the clipboard.
• The .tform document keeps the whole scene: finishes, pictures, cameras and setups, ready for the next version.

Automatic uses GPU ray tracing on a graphics card that supports it, then Standard GPU, which runs on any DirectX 12 card without ray-tracing hardware, then CPU compatibility, which runs the same work on the processor and is much slower. All three use the same materials and lighting, and the status says which one ran.

• The view stays quick while you move it and sharpens when you stop.
• Leave the Render tab and its live view stops; a final picture you started still finishes.

A large scan is prepared as a lighter render mesh, read in chunks without holding up the window: between 64,000 and 1,500,000 triangles, a million by default. The original stays complete in the document, and finishes, regions and cameras survive a change of detail. Point clouds need making into a mesh first.