Need rendering advice: blueprint animation

[Elo]

I've had a fairly detailed model of the house we're building for a while now. When I started I was going for a photorealistic render, but I wasn't particularly impressed with the results I was getting. I didn't want to spend the time it was going to take me to improve the texturing to a point I'd be satisfied with with so I let the project go promising myself I'd get back to it. Well, the footings for the house are in the ground now, so I figured if don't finish it now I never will and have been trying to come up with a nice looking render with the model I have.

 

My idea was for an animation of the blueprints pushing into 3d as unshaded lines then filling with a sort of pastel pseudo-watercolour as the camera flew around the target before finally settling and fading on a still of the model camera matched over a photograph of the site.

 

Unfortunately the shading effect I came up with doesn't look good on non rounded objects, such as a house. Next idea was to just render the model with standard materials with flat colours in the diffuse swatches and radiosity then composite the lines over the top. Ink n' paint lines are too thick and poor quality, while mental ray contours miss some of the lines from one bucket or frame to another, with an ugly shimmering effect. On top of that, the Zdepth at which lines are drawn needs to be set so low to pick up enough detail that it creates ugly black groupings.

 

I'm really done with it at this point and want to move on to other things, but I don't want to just throw out months of modelling. What I'm looking for is advice for rendering a fly around animation of the house that will look good without me needing to spend allot of time texturing it. Doesn't have to be a line render at this point, as long as it looks good with minimal work. I haven't lit the scene yet either, as I'm hoping a skylight system will be enough.

 

Suggestions?

 

- I had uploaded some videos to youtube, but the the forum doesn't allow me to post links, which makes this somewhat difficult to give examples...

Edited May 15, 2008 by Elo