Watson Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 Hello, I'm the Sales Operations Manager for a Design House \ Manufacturer. We currently use AutoCAD 2011 to provide line drawings to our customers, but render requests have become more and more common. Our Marketing group employs an Artist who uses 3DS Max for renders, but our company's President does not want to distract his efforts from print and web work to work on Sales' lowly render requests. My boss has asked me to develop a "Good", "Better", and "Best" approach to customer deliverables. Good = 3D line drawing from AutoCAD Better = a SketchUp style greyscale render (with shadow) to be produced out of CAD Best = Quick 3DS Max render with color The reason why we want the SketchUp style render is because that is an industry norm for us, but we also want to limit the number platforms we're employing. We are also not interested in producing the SketchUp style render in 3DS Max because we only have budget for a network license and want to limit the amount of time people are spending in that program. 1. We just upgraded to 2011 and no one has any experience here rendering out of CAD. You'd think it'd be pretty easy to just set up a simple template that we could do this in, but we're not making quick progress. Can anyone with any experience help me develop this? Does anyone know if it already exists somewhere? I have searched, but to no avail. Thanks in advance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Watson Posted March 25, 2011 Author Share Posted March 25, 2011 Here's an example of the style image we're trying to render out of CAD: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SLW210 Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 For something like that, I would just use different Layer colors and select either Realistic or Conceptual Visual Style. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scottish-lawd Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 The new AutoCAD 2012 has Inventor Fusion and have to say you get a better picture from it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack_O'neill Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 The image below was the only one I could come up with quickly. It was done as Hulk suggested above. Go to the view menu, down to visual styles and realistic. Conceptual is similar, try them both and see which suits you better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
f700es Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 You know you could always use a rendering engine with SketchUp. I use to do this with SU and Kerkythea when I worked for Goelst and Neocase. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SLW210 Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 I did something in conceptual.....just added color with the layers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Watson Posted March 25, 2011 Author Share Posted March 25, 2011 You know you could always use a rendering engine with SketchUp. I use to do this with SU and Kerkythea when I worked for Goelst and Neocase. Right, but that would involve working in SketchUp, which we don't want to do. In addition to that increasing the number of platforms we need to support, our drawings are very large and can take very long to just import into SketchUp. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Watson Posted March 25, 2011 Author Share Posted March 25, 2011 These are great, except one of the mandates is that the image displays shadow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patrick Hughes Posted March 26, 2011 Share Posted March 26, 2011 If you are working with an AutoCAD 3d model you might consider publishing to a 3d DWF. But the shadow thing might be a problem again. A side benefit of 3D dwf is you can ship the file to your customers and it allows them limitless viewing of the model. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cad64 Posted March 26, 2011 Share Posted March 26, 2011 These are great, except one of the mandates is that the image displays shadow. Look into Visual Styles: http://docs.autodesk.com/ACD/2010/ENU/AutoCAD%202010%20User%20Documentation/index.html?url=WS1a9193826455f5ffa23ce210c4a30acaf-524d.htm,topicNumber=d0e331606 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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