Autocad has another program called Impressions. I know that it was a freebie in 2009 if you had a subscription for Acad updates. It did rendering and other stylized things like pencil or different pen type looks to your Acad drawing. They had a free limited amount of time demo that you could download from Autodesk. I would guess that they still do.
I have not checked out Acad 2011, yet. … quit the subscription and still using 2009.
A third party add on to AutoCAD that we have been using for several years is M-Color. It provides several options for sketchy “hand drawn look” styles as well as many other rendering techniques. All exports are vector so you will always get a nice print. I still don’t think it replaces Photoshop or Illustrator; however it is a very handy tool to be tied into your cad drawing if you want to create quick renderings.
We primarily us it when rendering land plans, at least when the country was still doing private land development… Very efficient way to color lots while not having to export to PDF and render in PS. Staying in the CAD drawing allows easy edits and acreage/quantity counts to be made then you just re-export to M-Color if anything changes… The layer manager and work flow is very easy to use as well. Check it out
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