I have been using chief for the last 14 years and it has been an essential part of my custom home business as a designer/builder. One thing that has always been difficult with Chief however was getting good renders out of it for client Presentations and mainly just as a display of work to future clients. Today the common customer runs across super high quality renders and CGI all the time so they have no clue how difficult it is to produce great quality renders. They have no idea how much effort goes into texturing objects and lighting.
Chief has always lagged behind in this area however the ease of use and ability to produce construction documents quickly has always outweighed the downside of the presentation side because I could get into another program like Lumion or even Sketchup with plug-ins with exports.
However, with the new technologies that are now just coming out. This glaring difference in quality visualization and functionality is about to leave Chief in the dust and my past 14 years of experience with it. NVidia, Unreal, and Unity are releasing tools to make Visualization a seamless process for many other architectural products. I am talking about movie quality real time functionality.
Here is the bad part. All these tools are available now you just have to export and then spend a ton of time trying to retexture and relight a scene and as unbearable and time consuming as it is it can be done.
These new engines however are going to make the leap from Chief to the functionality of smart textures and lighting so far away from a reasonable amount of time when other packages plug right into them.
Why would chief put any resources into a render engine at this point when Unreal and Unity have free versions all the way up to studio versions. All that time needs to be put into compatibility to link up to these technologies.
YOU ARE A CONTENT PROVIDER. We need to get this through our heads. There is a new economy evolving and we as Chief Users are about to miss out on an opportunity. If Chief had the ability to seamlessly connect to these new technologies it would provide an opportunity as designers to monetize our content for this new economy. Wouldn't your client who is paying for the design pay even more money if the could buy the "NFT" (please research if your not aware of that). Not only could we receive another fee source this is the ultimate passive income strategy for building wealth for creative people in the near future.
As a company looking forward why would a young designer pick up Chief Architect and pay for recurring features when it is a dead end source. When a young person can get paid to design something for a client and if they don't purchase the NFT then the could sell it in an online market place.
The time to start this massive change is right now!!!
As a software company it is time to follow the trends of all the other companies in this space and make big announcements with well put together video of future abilities. Quit that old world stuff of letting the users know a couple months before you release X.... what the small feature changes are. Time to show us what the roadmap looks like for our skill set. I have invested in Chief For years and it has always been a fair exchange of value between customer and company. However, if the company is going to lead us to a dead end then we simply cannot fund that. Let us know that we should keep investing in you as that is what we are doing. Acknowledge the seismic shift in things that are happening with in the digital world right now and gain some direction. Set forth a plan for the user base.
This is a time to Grow Chief Architecture for the future. it is also a risk to be left behind. For the first time ever I let my continuing license expire because I do not see Chief as a company I can keep funding for future development if it is going in the wrong direction.
What we need is easy connectivity to Unity and Unreal. We need access to all the tools they have for texturing, lighting. We need to be in a file format such as FBX or USD to take advantage off all the technologies. We need to a direct connection so we can import/export or work directly in these new Tools such as NVidias Meta Verse. We need to be able to make changes and they update instantly. We need a market place where we can sell our digital products instead of sitting waisting away on our hard drives.
We need the tools for the future. I write this because I care and I really appreciate the years I have dedicated to learning the software and the business that it has allowed me to create. I am fearful that I have to leave in the near future if direction is not communicated to the user base about the future direction.
