Presentation home elevations on a budget... Help!

[rpatch]

Hey all... been a lurker for a long time but this is my first post, mostly because I'm having a mini-crisis.

I have a client who has hired me to draw 10 single family home elevations in a presentation-style to be used to show a town planning board. Now I have AutoCAD AD2, SketchUp, and DataCAD at my disposal at the moment, as well as a few graphics editing programs. I am just trying to figure out a way to make somewhat realistic elevations (flat front, not perspective for now) with decent colors and textures so that it doesn't just look like a flat CAD drawing.

So I guess any suggestions you may have would be a great help... like I said, they just need to have some depth to them, foliage around, something to show the streetscape of each potential design. But the colors, textures, hatching, etc are important too... I need a way to export them to a nice clean image.

Thanks in advance...

Rob

[grogers]

rp - We export our CAD file to Photoshop where everything else is added to complete the image. Over the years, we have built a library of trees, textures and building elements for production homes. The process is relatively quick. Our renders are used for hundreds of model homes in the western States.

Your building materials, texture and colors are one very important key. You will also need to study shading and light filtration to make them look realistic and not like a typical phony "flat" and digital impression.

If our client provides an ADT floor plan and elevations, we provide this service for about $400 each elevation.

Good luck!

[rpatch]

Thanks for the response... just one more more question. Do you export 2D line drawings from ADT into PhotoShop, or do you render/ hatch anything in CAD first?

Anyone else doing presentation elevations with a different method? Hand sketching, paint, or purely digital? Any preference to DataCAD,Autocad, or other programs for doing these do you think?

I'm just basically trying to explore every option to see what the best time to dollar ratio is going to be. I've drawn and painted by hand with good results before, but if theres a program that can re-create that look ordo it more efficiently that would obviously be a great help.

Thanks...

Rob

[grogers]

Negative. 2d elevations to PS/CS. We also utilize a Cintiq touch screen to add a modeled look to the final product.