Good morning Niels,
the product is designed by me, so I decide how it looks. Anodizing is a finicky process though so I waited to receive the actual parts before finishing the textures. I do find that anodized finishes within inventor seem to look great in the normal viewer but turn out way to bright during ray-tracing.
The inventor ray tracer needs surfaces to bounce from so perfectly flat models with 90,000000º degree corners will always result in a rendered look. For rendering purposes I like to use R0.05 fillets on my angles, but this is hell when using the same parts for drawings or machining. As stated I am still using IV 2020 and lack the model states functionality. In Q1 2023 we will upgrade our servers and update Inventor and Vault to 2023. Most of the parts we design ourselves will get <Render> states with rounded edges. Can't wait to compress my O-rings for cross sections.
All things considered it would be great if the Autodesk team could find the time to give us some new or improved tools but I think the chance of that happening is very slim.
As it stands now I tend to plan 3 days for renderings the cross sections and other images for the user-manuals. It's quite labor intensive because I need to color in the different volumes inside the product. Normally I use the assign affinity to keep 2 cores of the system to use photoshop. All the other cores are assigned to the ray trace process.
For these cress section I make a extrusion in the assembly file. Choose the right positional representation and the level of detail. Redo the extrusion to cut through all displayed parts and render one of the process stages. Sadly the extrusion uses the overall appearance of the cut parts. Displaying all cut sides of anodized parts as anodized. I might try to solve this with model states when the function is available to me next year.
