Hi! First of all, thanks Graphisoft for starting to engage the community more actively. As a suggestion on that, I think, we all would like somehow to see how all these ideas and suggestions that the community is giving, are translated onto some kind of roadmap or even some intention, just to understand what has been selected or understood from all the comments, etc.
Secondly, replying to your questions:
We never use Archicad render engine (C4D or redshift) to do renderings. We did in the past, but it was too complicated and too time-consuming for a mediocre result. Only "experts" in the office will be able to create a nice rendering and it will take a really long time, not only rendering-wise but trial and error to get the settings right. Also as other fellow community members have already said, Archicad doesn't have the right object libraries, and trees, and isn't even able to handle high polygons or large scenes with many instances.
Currently, we have 2 workflows for our renderings and images:
We use an external renderer, mainly twinmotion, but sometimes (rarely) Unreal or Blender, for the High quality renders. These renders usually need to be very good and/or very fast and always need very high-quality assets, especially vegetation.
For everyday images, work-in-progress, coordination, or even presentation of a more diagrammatic style, we use either 3D documents or more and more, screenshots from the 3D window. Like @Tim Ball mentioned earlier, this is a number one priority in most of the people's workflows, being able to use HIGH QUALITY 3D captures from the model in the views and layouts. At the moment the quality that the views provide is so bad that everyone I know does screenshots and then bring them as an image... quite a terrible workaround, as when you need to update your image after a model change, you need to repeat the whole manual process and almost never the image looks the same (ratio, camera, etc...) So this should be a priority to enable quick and easy images that look good and are updated in real-time with the model changes.
Following this, I think the rendered sections and elevations are a really nice addition to the conceptual design workflow, but there are 2 major flaws that make them almost unusable:
1. This rendering style should be a Model View Option and not part of the section settings. Now, we need to duplicate sections in order to carry both sets of documentation: conceptual style AND standard technical documentation. Using an MVO will allow using a single section for as many styles are possible.
2. This workflow doesn't work for plan views, which is very annoying. We need to use Graphic overrides for this and create dozens of overrides for the different materials. This mess up our files as all of these overrides rules make the search for other rules more difficult.
As mentioned in other comments and threads, shadows could be really revamped: being able to show real shadows, even when the model has a cutting plane or similar will improve a lot the model visuals and the rendered documentation.
Better handling of instances will definitely help also to populate our models with trees, people, and other assets.
Also, instead of creating every year a new additional image catalog that is somehow detached from the template and that won't satisfy everyone, GS could add a procedural surface creator, that creates also the corresponding surface cover fill. This is not science fiction, there is already one online, that of course has only link to revit...
https://architextures.org/
This would enable almost infinite access to surfaces that are also seamless.
Jorge Benéitez
M.arch | Registered Architect | ARB
BIM Implementation | Graphisoft Registered Consultant.
