RGCDandD

Blender is another good thought. Price tag is very enticing at least, and hey it's worth a look based on the samples they have on the website. Exactly as you said though, looks like a steeper learning curve than Sketchup with plugins, coming from Chief.

Great, that's a lot of good info, thanks David. Seems like Sketchup is a really powerful tool with a couple plugins to help the render. I'll definitely look into that deeper. Thanks Michael as well, I'll also take a look into Twin Motion. Ryan

I'm looking some ideas for taking my chief plans to the next level for marketing. Marketing for our own business and for our builders to pre-sell their spec homes (and pay us more). For interior renderings I'm more than happy with the PBR capability and I feel I can make any space look really nice. But on the exterior rendering side, I can get the ray trace to pump out a pretty good product, but it's just not quite there in terms of realism and being in line with the top firms of the world who get countless likes on Instagram. I'm wondering what you guys use and would recommend, specifically coming from Chief. One of my wish-list items would be fairly seamless export from chief into a render software. What would you recommend? I've looked into Lumion already, but I use a Mac and working with Bootcamp and a windows partition just isn't feasible and has already caused problems and a bit of wasted time. Attached are a couple samples of what I've done using just chief and some editing in Lightroom. I'm hoping to get to the next level and get to the real 'wow-factor' type renders where you're not quite sure if it's a photo or not. Thanks a lot, Ryan.