CAD or other for photorealistic rendering???

Hi I work as an Architectural Technician and have always created 3D modells of my work in CAD, i have however always thought that the rendering capabilities of CAD were'nt up to much so have'nt used them alot, i'm now looking into creating photorealistic scenes of our petential developements, could someone please show me some examples of what is possible using AUTOCAD 2006 rendering.... Or altenativley any other drawing packages (preferably CAD Compatable) that i could import my dwg file into and simply render,

Thankyou Matt

well Acad really stepped up with 07s render engine. 08/09 have some improvement over that as well.

what kinds of things do you render?

Take a look through our Showcase section to see what some of our members are doing.

You might also want to think about upgrading to Autocad 2009. The rendering capability is much better than 2006.

I be with Cad64!:)However good rendering with 3ds max & other ,i always

want to render with acad 2008/9!You can see many acad render posts in "showcase"!

Its housing schemes that i work on so lighting and backgrounds are things that i'd look for does anyone rate google sketch up at all? ive played around with it but it lacked realism i thought... maybe i need to put more practice in?

You wanna be realistic result with sketchup,you must need to use rendering

plugin (eg.su podium,IDX Renditioner,vue..etc)...

you can see...http://sketchup.google.com/download/plugins.html:)

I'm not a big fan of Sketchup, but you can get some pretty decent renders out of it if you use the Kerkythea renderer. It's a free program and one that you should definitely take a look at, if you decide to go that route.