How to achieve photo-realistic rendering?

[CliffLloyd]

Hello,

 

I'm an amateur home designer.  I have no ambition to go professional but I enjoy creating designs for my own edification and I actually find it relaxing (is that strange?).  My goal is to one day come up with the perfect design for my wife and I as we contemplate retirement living.   I'm currently fascinated by the resurgence of 70's Ranch style designs with modern twists - but that isn't relevant to my question :)  I've been using Home Designer Pro since 2019 and for the most part this product meets my needs as an amateur.  I find some aspects of it a little strange including some of the choices it makes for attic walls and I find building roofs hard but that is likely a lack of my architectural knowledge more so than a fault of the product.  As I look at professional designs on sites like Cool House Plans and House Plans .COM I see a standard of photo realistic rendering of things like grass and surface textures that are infinitely superior to those that I can obtain with Home Designer Pro (even with the improvements in the 2022 version).  So my question is this (finally!).  Is professional grade photo realistic rendering a feature of the superior Chief Architect product or do professionals use another product / technique to achieve realistic renderings?  

Thanks in advance for any insight you are willing to share!

 

 

[DavidJPotter]

Anything that you enjoy cannot be "strange", just enjoy what you enjoy! Many dedicated, hard-working Chief Users can and do photo-realistic renderings as part of their business model and services. It involves having a 3D modeling software (Chief, Home Designer, Revit, Sketch Up etc.) to have something to render. Many users obtain professional grade renderings just with Home Designer Pro or Chief Premier or Interiors and some few others use a third party rendering software like Luminon, Twin Motion and others to take it a step further. for what you are trying to do for yourself I think Home Designer Pro's Physically Based Rendering Engine should be just fine for your purposes, you just cannot expect that "clicking a button" will obtain the results you desire. It takes tweaking lighting,  materials and  backdrop until you get just the look you are after. Nothing really worthwhile comes "easy".

 

DJP

[Kbird1]

16 hours ago, CliffLloyd said:

Is professional grade photo realistic rendering a feature of the superior Chief Architect product or do professionals use another product / technique to achieve realistic renderings?  

 

Even in Premier, Chief's Renderings are not truly Photo Realistic , and at this point Chief will not allow 3rd Parties like D5 Renderer to make plugins,

as they are working on their own new Ray Tracing GPU based Render , though it is not Photo Realistic either ( and does not claim to be.)

 

M.

[basketballman]

I use other products such as D5 render to create renderings such as the ones below.

 

 

[ericepv]

You can produce some really nice renderings in Chief  but you'll need to upgrade from HD Pro to Chief to get the ray trace feature.There are some excellent video tutorials in the knowledge base which are a good place to start. From there, it's a matter of learning the various features and techniques described through experimentation. Here are a couple of scenes I rendered in Chief (with some symbols and materials brought in from outside sources)...

 

rendered in X9:

:

 

rendered in X13:

 

 

There are other rendering programs that can produce really outstanding results but that requires investing in more software and also learning it. I guess it's all a matter of how much time and money you're willing to invest and for what type of result.