creative director portfolio content?

All,

How much process work should be communicated in a portfolio aiming for a Creative Director position?
Are sketches, models, CAD, etc. relevant? If not, what skills and/or types of projects are expected?

Thanks in advance.

Definetly relevant. You want to show your are not only competent, but excell at the design part of the job, that your team will respect your capabilities. Otherwise you may end up with an A player who becomes difficult to manage.

In addition to that you will want to show strategy development, insight gathering, how you adjusted your tactics of strategy implementation based on new information gained along the way and your analysis of product performance once in the marketplace (i.e. What you did well vs what you learned to do better next time). All these things can be shown visually pretty easily or can be a part of your voice over if you are a very good story teller.