Maxwell Render is what I use, along with Podium (a plug-in for SketchUp) occasionally. Maxwell is extremely powerful and can produce photo-realistic results with minimal effort, as well as highly stylized and artistic images if that's more your style. It runs great on my Mac Pro and takes full advantage of all the power. Go to benchwell.com to see what I mean.
I use AutoCad Revit Architecture Suite 2009 through bootcamp on 64bit Windows Vista Business and that runs extremely well. I tried Bently Microstation, and it ran well, though the interface was not to my taste. Maya, Form Z and such also run well through bootcamp. In the architecture field, you're really going to handicap yourself if you own a Mac and refuse to use bootcamp and install a Windows OS as well, too much of the software for the field is Windows exclusive. Hope this helps! Click to expand.Don't take this the wrong way but those renderings are far from amazing, personally I wouldn't even class those as a photo (realistic) rendering, do a google for autodesk viz or 3ds max and architectural renderings then you will see amazing, the lighting isn't bad but the materials are really poor.
Check out our 2018 guide to the 30 best free CAD software tools (2D/3D CAD programs) for beginners, intermediates, and advanced users. All of them are free. Best 3D CAD software for. 3D rendering became a commonplace feature that enabled new tools that had been impossible on the drawing board. This allowed engineers and designers to.
Note I do 3D work for a living and as such I may be overly critical on this area as I aim to make my work as close to being photo-realistic as possible. Now admittedly they are windows programs but I'd rather use 3ds max than archicad. Click to expand.Maxwell Render runs on OSX, supports nearly every 3D modeling software available, and creates much stronger renderings than even those excellent ArchiCad examples you posted. ArchiCad is a decent program, but its feature set and capabilities are quickly getting outpaced by other programs in the industry. Revit is obviously the industry leader, but Bentley Architecture is an equally impressive program, and Gehry Technologies Digital Project is perhaps the most impressive BIM (Building Information Modeling, of which ArchiCad is) software I have ever seen. Granted the programs I have mentioned are windows exclusive, and in the case of Digital Project can be nearly $15,000 a seat, but I'm really just trying to drive home the point that if you're an Architect who uses a Mac, Bootcamp really is a necessity. (sorry for going off on a tangent).
Click to expand.I've been looking at either Vectorworks for ArchiCad as a replacement for AutoCad in the long run. I'll be opening a small, 3 person Architectural office in the next couple of months, and since I'll be starting from scratch, I would like to go all Mac this time around. I've watched all the video tutorials of ArchiCad and seem to like that over Vectorworks. It seems easy enough to pick up (I've been using AutoCad for the past 10+ years or so) and I really like the BIM aspect of it. I do a lot of simple residential projects though, and I often wonder if ArchiCad is actually too advanced for me - things like some easy dormer or deck additions, simple 1 story room additions, carports, etc. things that I can do very easily in 2d even with AutoCad LT. So my question to you, or anyone else, is - how is ArchiCad for simple 2d stuff like this?
Creating a full, new, 3d house seems just great in ArchiCad, but what about some easy little 2d things? Any help is appreciated.
EDIT: Also, unrelated - how is the SketchUp integration with ArchiCad? I do all my presentation and modelling in SketchUp (LOVE IT!!) and am just curious.
If it's rendering software that you want to interface with a modelling program, then is the best bargain on the Mac ($149). It's a full 3D app (so you can do modelling animations as well), but the rendering engine and render management is superb. It has the easiest HDRI setup of any program I've used. I send it FBX from SketchUp (but v. 5.0 should offer native SU model support). The quality is fantastic, IMO: (and it's fast).
It's so highly multi-threaded that you can have multiple renders from different scenes all going on simultaneously. (Extra Brownie points for naming the building ) You can check out some more examples on my blog below.