The renderer we currently use for thumbnails in the gallery and the model details pages has its limitations and we’ve wanted to improve these previews for a long time.
The reason being that we want to give everyone visiting Shapeways a better impression of what the actual model will look like. One of the limitations of the current renderer is that it lacks smoothing, which gives ugly results when triangles have large surface areas. Moreover the lack of depth perception in the rendered image, the overall dark look of the gallery and the somewhat odd camera position are things we wanted to improve upon. 
For this reason we have been developing a new render solution. And we want to give you a sneak peek on where we are now. We are very curious as to what you think! Below two images: one of the old and one of thenew renderings. Lots of thanks to Bart, Robert and team for making this possible. Please comment and let us know what you think!

(Renders of Bathsheba’s Gyroid)