SketchUp Style Template for AutoCAD?

[Watson]

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.

[Watson]

Here's an example of the style image we're trying to render out of CAD:

[SLW210]

For something like that, I would just use different Layer colors and select either Realistic or Conceptual Visual Style.

[scottish-lawd]

The new AutoCAD 2012 has Inventor Fusion and have to say you get a better picture from it.

[Jack_O'neill]

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.

 

[f700es]

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.

[SLW210]

I did something in conceptual.....just added color with the layers.

[Watson]

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.

[Watson]

These are great, except one of the mandates is that the image displays shadow.

[Patrick Hughes]

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.

[Cad64]

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