When pitching a great design to a client, your pitch will stand or fall, based on the presentation of architectural visuals. However, your visuals will stand or fall with the quality of the entourage, that is, additional elements such as furniture, plants, and people that add lifelike variation to the image. In fact, a promising design can be marred by bad entourage. As entourage is not specific to a project, you can build up a library of entourage components in SketchUp and choose suitable elements to add to your scene.

Entourage of professional quality is hard to create. Obtaining in-focus photos of trees, with the right light and background, and then clipping around them to remove all the background elements can take forever. That's why, quality entourage has its price.

In this chapter, you will find out ways to find or create entourage that you will be happy with. If you don't have the money to spend, you'll learn how to create your own entourage....