Jay900

Hi Renerabbitt, Thank you for he insight! I did more research after reading your post and it seems like Rendering is a whole different step/process. You are right that the amount of hours and number of people that work on it can vary greatly which can vary the rendering quality. I saw some people who model in Sketchup then render in Vray and then edit in Photoshop/Premiere so it was quite a process. I guess we have to question "how much effort is necessary to get results that will get the job done without wasting time/money?". Also, now that we are discussing this: what is the best process to go from CA to Rendering in Vray/Lumion/Thea for images and videos? You mentioned CA doesn't do UV mapping very well. How do you work around this? I also saw many people saying CA has some limitations vs Revit/Sketchup give you freedom to design anything (of course this freedom comes at a cost of tediousness/cost of software). What other limitations have you noticed in CA and how do you work around them? Thank you!

I also have a question before purchasing CA. I have also done a lot of research on CA vs Revit vs Sketchup vs ArchiCad, etc. Overall I have found that CA is really good for residential projects and far easier to use than Revit. One thing that seems to be lacking is photorealistic renderings. For Revit and Sketchup there are 3rd party software like Lumion and Vray to create photorealistic renderings but CA doesn't seem to work with as well with those. I also found CA's Ray Trace to be not as good as Lumion/Vray. The best rendering I have seen from CA is the modern style home in the Rendering Tutorial but even there the landscaping looked very fake (perhaps they didn't really spend time working on the landscaping?) This is what I'm referring to: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/1910/ray-trace-rendering-introduction.html?playlist=103 I did find you can export 3Ds file from CA and then import it in Sketchup and then use Lumion/Vray however the 3Ds file is not that great to import into Sketchup. Can someone tell me what are the best options to get photorealistic renderings with CA? Please provide any video walkthroughs/images done in CA (or design done in CA and rendering done in another software). Thank you!