Getting better renders in Fusion 360

Nowadays my workflow revolves around Autodesk’s Eagle and Fusion 360 (I still haven’t migrated to the Fusion 360 Electronics, but am planning to), and making use of their integration exporting my PCBs to Fusion and using it to design its enclosure. And as a project reaches its final stages one may want to also generate some high-quality renders for advertising, helping with a pitch or whatever reason. But Fusion, even though has a lot of qualities, really isn’t the best at rendering, at least not as much as Blender or Keyshot.

There are some techniques to get the better render with Fusion, and there are plenty of videos and tutorials on this, but here I’ll share the lessons I found more useful. Let me break it down in two separate aspects: the model itself, and the scene setup.

The model

This sounds obvious – because it is – but you should dedicate some time to make your model as realistic as possible. I like to think of “realistic” as “flawed”, because if a model is too perfect, it doesn’t look real, always keep this in mind. In my specific case, as most of my models have some printed circuit board, it’s important to make the PCB look great. When exporting it from Eagle, it’s important to check the soldermask, silkscreen, and pads colors (for example, the default solder mask color is green, which is fine, but it should be the same color as the PCB you’ll have manufactured). In this example, I’ll use a white PCB with black silkscreen, so this should be changed before exporting, and most important, every component should have its 3D model, so your model will be fully populated. If not, you’ll have a PCB without components, which just wouldn’t be realistic. Most libraries only include the component symbol and footprints, the most critical for the PCB design process, so it’s possible you’ll have to edit your libraries and include 3D packages for each component.

How much effort you’ll put into making the PCB model better is up to you – it often depends on how much of the PCB is shown, for example, if it’s in a fully opaque enclosure, or a transparent one. Say you have included 3D package for every single component on your board, you can still make it better by changing the appearance of some components, as most of them come with standard appearances that just aren’t accurate. In the image above, I’ve changed the USB-C connector, switch sockets, and microcontroller chip materials. Capacitors, resistors, and such are so small that it’s just not worth it to go out of my way to edit them.

This effort pays off: there’s a sense of realism when you look at the model and see different materials, with different textures, light reflections, and their interactions.

 

This isn’t exclusive to the PCB: the more textures your model has, and the more accurate those are, the more realistic the whole thing will feel. Sometimes if you look only into one of those details when you change it, it may feel like it alone doesn’t make a difference, but when you combine all of that it’s just night and day.

It’s also interesting to find assets to complement your design, for example, this product has a USB-C connector, so it would be just nice if our render had a USB-C cable connected to it, just like it would be in real life, when being used. Grabcad has an amazing library of free 3D models that we can use and it’s my go-to library to find assets like this USB cable, connectors, buttons, and what else.

Also, I do love some RGB, so some of my projects may have some unnecessary LEDs, it just looks great. But there’s a catch when rendering a PCB with RGB LEDs (in plural): Fusion has materials such as LEDs and lights – categorized as “Emissive”, and you may use them, but when you change the appearance of one RGB LED in the board, one component, it changes all the instances os this component in the board. Unfortunately, this is a problem without an elegant solution, but here’s how I solve it in my projects.

In our current example, I use 12 side-emitting RGB LEDs all around the board’s edges and when rendering, if you want to transmit the idea of a RGB effect, the most effective way is to make it some kind of rainbow, so each one of the 12 LEDs should be in a different hue. Since I can’t change the appearance of a individual LED as exported from Eagle, I add new LEDs in the 3D project, and set the appearance of each one, one by one. That way I can set a different color in each one of them, getting that rainbow effect that just looks so good in the render. Also, by grouping these LEDs in a component, you can toggle their visualization quickly, if you’d like to render the product with the LEDs “turned off”.

Having your PCB all ready, you’ll probably design some kind of enclosure and accessories for it. In this case, I designed a stacked acrylic case for it, with screws in each corner, and I also added the USB-C cable. Everything we’ve seen so far is true for these parts also: the material/appearance of each one is really important, and you should pay attention to the smallest details.

For example, the screws’ material should be some type of metal, in my case I’ve chosen steel. Fusion 360 has a nice library of materials, but not all of them are perfectly realistic: for the acrylic plates in the keyboard case, I personally think the glass material resembles more a clear acrylic plate than the acrylic material itself, in the way it reacts to light. Sometimes, even if you’re using stainless steel parts, the aluminum material feels more real. This is something you find out by trial and error, because the environment itself will also play a role in how the materials look. But the stock materials may not be perfect for your taste, luckily you can also tweak each material properties, make it more or less reflectant, change roughness, color, and so on.

PolyHaven is an amazing resource hub if any of Fusion’s library materials can’t satisfy your needs. They have a great collection of HDRi images (we’ll get to these when learning on how to setup the environment) and textures of all types. I won’t delve into this topic here, but it’s quite easy to download textures and import them as materials in Fusion, I recommend this tutorial.

 

Final tip: this may seems like it’s nothing, but it makes a whole lot of difference, and it’s one of the Autodesk’s tips that helped me the most: avoid sharp corners, unless you’re rendering a knife. Even the most squared cube, if it’s something real, it’s not 100% sharp, all the corners have some roundness to it. The tip then is to fillet/chamfer every corner possible, by a small amount, let’s say 0.25mm – this is by feeling, you can try different values. It will affect how light bounces, giving better highlights to your object and just making it a little more realistic. Don’t believe me? See for yourself the difference down below.

 

The environment

Now we need to create a scene for the render – we can always render as it is right now, but there’s a lot of room for improvement still. A lot of professional photography concepts apply here: the more knowledge you have on that the better.  There are two aspects to consider about it: the environment itself – you may want a flat solid color as a background, or a full realistic scenario, maybe a studio, a forest, a beach – and the lighting in this environment and how it affects the object.

Fusion has some environments, from generic well-lit photography studios to photo-realistic ones such as a corn field, a mall parking lot, streets, and so on. Each one of these has specific attributes that we can edit and tweak to our needs. In the Scene Settings dialog we’ll find all of these settings, it’s where you can choose between a solid color background or the environment one, the brightness of the ambient, the camera exposure, focal length, depth of field and more (I told you it relates a lot to photography).

But, if the Fusion environments library isn’t enough for you, you can always go back to PolyHaven, and look for HDRi images. These are full high resolution 360° images, with built-in lighting information and how different materials react to it, they’re complete scenarios that you can import in Fusion and use as needed – you can even disable the background image, and use only its ambient lightning.

Given this not-so-brief introduction, how should we proceed with setting up our scene? For me, this is the point when you need to visualize in your mind what render are you aiming: what kind of lighting setup, the framing, the ambient, everything. One thing that helps me a lot is references: I search for renders, often related to industrial design, on Instagram, Behance, Pinterest and such, and use those to make a picture in my head of what I want for my render. You should have most of the final picture in your head, as that will guide you through the next decisions.

And the first one is a major: you can choose one of these available environments, or you can build one!

If none of these environments is what you need, you can simply build your scenario. Since we have emissive materials in Fusion, we can build our own lamps, and position them around the object in the setup we find better. We can also include props to the scene, like a backdrop, a stand for displaying our object, whatever our mind thinks of.

For this first render of this keyboard I chose an hybrid approach: I’m using one of Fusion default environments, but I’ve added some elements to it, such as an orange and purple light, for some fill light and backlight, some switches and keycaps around the macropad. These elements will also be affected by the lights, creating shadows and making the whole setup feel more real. I deeply suggest you understand a little about three-point lighting.

Here we can compare the before and after of the renders: in the first one I used the default acrylic material and plastic for the keycaps. In the second, I’m using custom versions of the acrylic and polycarbonate materials, since I’ll be using translucent keycaps in real life. The purple and orange lights give some flare to the scene, together with the RGB of the object itself.

It’s also important to try different angles and poses, play around with the render focus, focal length and depth of field. You have endless possibilities, it all depends on what you want, you may want to make it more dynamic, add movement to it, whatever fits your taste.

And then, I’ve built a more complex scene, with a rock stand to display the keyboard, a dark room with a metal fence as backdrop and neon light in the back. This is a whole new setup with more props and different lighting settings:

And this gives a whole different result:

To get to this result I had to tweak the brightness of the environment, the focal length of the camera, added depth of field and messed a little with the camera focus. All those little changes add up in the end, so don’t neglect them.

A lot of these aspects I’ve just glanced over, so if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to hit me up on Discord or Instagram, I’d be glad to help.