Exploring trends and innovations shaping the industry with KeyShot’s Derek Cicero. Note: This article is sponsored by KeyShot.
Derek Cicero is the Vice President of Products and Strategy at KeyShot, bringing over 15 years of industry experience to the company. As a computer graphics expert, he combines a deep understanding of the technical aspects of 3D rendering and visualization with a dedication to aesthetics, design and accessibility.
![](https://www.idsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Derek-Cicero-1024x1024.png)
What are you hearing about industrial designers’ workloads and everyday work needs?
We’re hearing that designers have embraced the power of making decisions in 3D. They want to work more effectively, like by making certain tasks and workflows repeatable, and they want it to be easier to collaborate across teams.
I call this the “third phase of 3D adoption.” First designers came to understand 3D and what it can do in relation to traditional 2D workflows, then they developed an understanding of the more advanced tools such as animation. Now they are focused on reusability of all the assets and how they can help other teams across the organization.
The industrial designer often owns the asset and the final deliverable needed for manufacturing. We’re seeing more and more people wanting to reuse that asset for packaging, for selling, for marketing. And so I think we’ve really seen that collaboration outside the ID team and being more cross functional, being a bigger need.
What are you hearing about industrial designers’ workloads and everyday work needs?
We’re hearing that designers have embraced the power of making decisions in 3D. They want to work more effectively, like by making certain tasks and workflows repeatable, and they want it to be easier to collaborate across teams.
I call this the “third phase of 3D adoption.” First designers came to understand 3D and what it can do in relation to traditional 2D workflows, then they developed an understanding of the more advanced tools such as animation. Now they are focused on reusability of all the assets and how they can help other teams across the organization.
The industrial designer often owns the asset and the final deliverable needed for manufacturing. We’re seeing more and more people wanting to reuse that asset for packaging, for selling, for marketing. And so I think we’ve really seen that collaboration outside the ID team and being more cross functional, being a bigger need.
![](https://www.idsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Derek-Cicero-1024x1024.png)
What do you think is driving this third phase, this need for more collaboration and a faster workflow?
A couple of things. First is the production demands. We recently conducted a survey of nearly 2,100 industrial designers; their biggest concern for the immediate future was meeting the production volume of their work.
Second, the use of 3D design is maturing. Now that people understand all the ways you can make 3D visuals, and all the output you can get – like 360-degree views, exploded views, animation – they’re realizing there’s so much more they can do with that output.
Plus, with capabilities like augmented reality and virtual reality, you can see even more context and detail. For example: if you have a very large installation, a rendering is never really going to do it justice, even if you put a person next to it. But if you communicate that in AR or VR, you can provide a sense of the actual scale of the object and let a viewer explore its details, right?
So now, people are realizing that throughout the decision-making process, visualization can be used for different things at different times. Sometimes you want a very detailed rendering, sometimes you want a sense of scope and scale. Our customers have realized that KeyShot gives you the ability to do all those things from one asset.
KeyShot has lots of big commercial clients around the world. What kind of technology are in-house industrial design teams adopting?
Our larger commercial clients usually have a lot of advanced users and a large pool of KeyShot users. And they’re really pushing the envelope in terms of all the ways that KeyShot can be used. One common thing we’re seeing is digital design reviews.
They’re sending visuals out for approval and feedback directly from KeyShot, no rendering required, with Keyshot Web. That’s our newest product, and it allows designers to produce one single link out of KeyShot that can be used downstream for decision makers to review. Those decision makers can quickly see an WebGL version alongside rendered hero images, 360-degree views; they can even see it in AR and VR with a QR code that works on Android or iPhone. The QR code also links to VR headsets.
In addition, we’ve definitely seen 3D printing grow tremendously. KeyShot’s 3MF export, which we worked on with Stratasys, has really allowed people to use that same KeyShot asset to produce a 3D print that can have things like transparency in it, which was not really something you would have seen in years past. That allows a level of detailed decision-making from the 3D printing, instead of having to create physical samples. It’s a tremendous time and money saver.
What’s also happened with the big commercial clients is an understanding that once they have this 3D asset in KeyShot, they can use it to replace photography and marketing. We’re seeing more and more people use that KeyShot file as a cross-functional single source of truth for final visualization, to ensure that when they’re producing marketing or ecommerce assets, they’re doing so based on the most accurate representation of that physical object.
What about smaller design firms or freelancers? What kind of technology are they adopting to help them do their work?
The smaller firms or freelancers can be a one-stop shop for everything. They really benefit from the animation tools and Network Rendering, which allow them to provide a level of quality and volume of rendering and design that really blows away the expectations of what people can produce today. We’ve empowered freelancers to create a VR or AR experience directly from KeyShot without having to go learn a tool like Unity or Unreal. So we’ve bent the curve of complexity down in 3D: those smaller design firms and freelancers have the same toolset that all the big companies have, but inside KeyShot. They don’t need multiple tools in their toolbox to achieve best-in-class results for their clients.
There have been new 3D rendering tools popping up over recent years. What should industrial designers be sure to look for when choosing one?
What’s so amazing and fun about the 3D space is how much and how quickly it changes. There are so many talented people out there trying to solve problems. It’s an embarrassment of riches in terms of all the cool tools that exist.
With all these options, sometimes people can end up relying too much on specialist tools, which causes problems in your process. CAD data is generally pretty heavy; it’s pretty large data. Moving it from tool to tool can be relatively tricky sometimes. So you really want to make sure, if you’re using a new tool, that it’s really providing a specific value that you can’t get from more of a utilitarian tool like KeyShot.
Also, because there’s a lot of change in the 3D space, it’s important to know that tools come and go all the time. Some large corporations shift their 3D strategy every couple of years. So do you want to spend a bunch of time learning a tool that might be gone in two years? Probably not.
3D tools historically have been very hard to use and demand a level of 3D knowledge that can be very intimidating for people who are new to 3D or trying to move from a 2D to a 3D workflow. At KeyShot, we’re always trying to democratize the process so that we can bring in all these people who have a need for visualization but don’t have the time to invest in learning very complex tools.
From the beginning, we saw there was a huge need for non-traditional 3D users to get the power of 3D. Our focus is on empowering industrial designers to utilize KeyShot without requiring them to have a deep 3D background, to allow them to focus on what makes them specialist designers, which is their creativity. We get the tool out of the way, and the complexity out of the way, so they can do what they do best: their creative work.