When I first came to ArchiCAD I would do the same. I spent the last few years of school doing the autocad to illustrator to make pretty workflow. Like this video? Follow Shoegnome on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube for more!Īnd if you bring them in as vectors (pdf or dwg) instead of say a jpg or tif into Illustrator then there’s a lot of cool things you can do.

Update : ArchiCAD 18 offers some new ways to make this technique even better click here to watch another way to create an awesome multi-layer rendering. Also to get better materials in ArchiCAD, watch this video on stealing them from SketchUp. Want to take the image you created a step further? Check out David’s advice on alternatives to photorealistic renderings. Just remember that it won’t be the exact same steps or locations… Enjoy the Video! If it can be done in Photoshop, it can probably be done in Gimp. I imagine going from Photoshop to Gimp is like going from ArchiCAD to Revit or vice versa. And I believe there’s an Illustrator type program as well created by the same group.

If you’re not familiar with Gimp, check it out. It’s a great program, but it is just different enough from Photoshop that I feel like I’m either wearing mittens or have had a few beers. I think I succeeded.ĭisclaimer: I’m using Gimp in the video and I am still fairly clumsy in the software. I was looking to create images from ArchiCAD that appealed to former coworkers who only liked stuff from SketchUp. And that’s actually where the original idea came from. I like that the final product mimics some of the qualities of an image from SketchUp. The images were combined in a 3rd party program like Photoshop or Gimp. The final rendering is a combination of images from the Sketch Rendering Engine and the Internal Rendering Engine found in ArchiCAD. And you could imagine that with a little more effort scalies, trees, etc. It’s not the most complex image, but it’s fast and easy. The above rendering is fairly typical of what I show clients these days.

Archicad render engine