Rendering engine VS graphic engine

Architecture graphic is always an interesting part of designing, it helps us expressing our concept and also getting more attraction from viewer. I am aware that in some architecture school, pretty looking presentation board means nothing, but let us be frank that beautiful images do help us to gain more attention or at least better score.

So this time I want to share to you guys about what I usually do in this step of my project. Personally speaking I like to work more on the photoshop compare to work on rendering software, firstly it saves me much time to just render a simple image, secondly rendering software normally has more parameters and settings to adjust which makes it more difficult than a graphic editor software. One of my friend just rendered his project for 2 days and still do lots of photoshop works afterwards, where my way is to render images for probably around 1-3 hours and 2-4hours of photoshop work, depends on how detail or difficult is the photoshop work. Here are some example of 'before and after' images, from a basic (even bad) rendering to final image with ONLY photoshop touch.

However, basic rendering with graphic engine will not produce an image that is as clear as the rendering engine does. Moreover, different rendering software will definitely produce a different rendering result, 3dmax which is one of the most famous rendering software create a very clean and sharp image which makes your building stands out instead of blending with other elements. Take a look at some of the example of my project which use 3dmax rendering! (credit to : DengXu)

So now, don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say which one is better, feel free to work like what you guys prefer to. Me myself also has been using rendering software quite a lot not only for perspective drawing but also creating for example analysis drawing. The main reason of using rendering software is because I need the effect of clay for my model in order for me to do the analysis, and such rendering result can be produced by using rendering software, called Kerkythea. Kerkythea has a feature called 'clay rendering' which is easy to use and creates a very unique result unlike the other software. With a little touch of photoshop afterwards, we can produce such images:

There are still tons of rendering and graphic editor software out there, there is no such best rendering software, try to use all of them and find the one that fits your work most! It is always fun to work with architectural graphic, either for expressing technical drawing or simply just a perspective view. Pretty pictures may not be the most important thing in architecture, but 'people will stare, make it worth their while!' So guys, let me know if you have any comments about other rendering or graphic software, and let me know which 'before and after' image is your favorite?? :)