Renerabbitt

Here is the same project using sketchup and Thea 2.0 It's actually a really nice interface and thea 2.0 works WAY faster than 1.5 This was 19 minutes to render at HD res:

A few years back Altair bought out Thea and started pumping new life into the brand...the 2.1 version plugins are much faster to render than thea studio...I got in touch with Altair a few months back and they said they were in development..checked in today and they are in the beta state of the software which I believe you can download for free...but the time limit on the license is probably not enough to be able to do anything with it starting with no experience in the software. https://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=167&t=25896 I had to put this together last night in CA and render in Thea...came out okay, not photo-realistic but good enough for the presentation being made:

Made a quick vid to illustrate some of what Thea can do with a CA scene:

nice table saw and racks..I only have one 18' x3' wide rack for lumber Been at it for 3 weekends now mostly working solo, a few dump runs, managed to break out my irons and swap wheels on the bike and change all the front end bushing on my dodge pickup as well...still needs a lot of organizing...the best part was being able to follow a plan...worked out great so far...'cept I forgot to plan a space for my table saw and paint sprayer...doh!! the rolling ski gear rack is definitely a favorite and needs some additional work . I'll probably end up rewiring the whole place, previous work was garbage and I need an additional circuit or two

You would need to be either tethered or Remote desktop with the ipad pro and X11 I vote for the surface book 2 or the next iteration..save your pennies- they are developing new stylus tech..they just pulled a patent

totally agreed, and not here to argue, for those looking for a built in best of, raytrace for the win..but at a fraction of the setup time in CA's Ray trace I can have double the render quality in a 3rd party software..I don't spend any time in PBR really, my sun/cameras/materials are already set in a SAM .plan it's pretty instantaneous...that is the draw for me personally..if I want better quality I export. CA doesn't have true spherical backdrops or environment light, it doesn't offer material clipping, instancing, material blending or layering, its AO is a joke, doesn't offer save state rendering, material or object ID masks(or any other masks).No displacement, no mediums, poor emitter control, no .ies support, no coatings, no anisotropy, sigma, micro roughness, translucent layers, absorption. It doesn't have camera functions like F-stop focal length size of lense, aperture, ISO, Custom resolution etc. and the biggest annoyance for me is its cross section slider isn't true in the sense that if I cut away the roof, the sun shouldn't shine through!!!!!!!! No batch rendering, no farms, no material tree, no model tree, no global editing Man I feel like I can go on and on now that I'm typing...CA is a joke for rendering, truly.

Just an FYI Thea houses an incredibly powerful HDR spherical background tool with support for HDR lighting..the clouds were not photoshopped in but we're a 16k spherical image that actually produces reflections and light. This is the same method used for creating mirrored finishes on vehicles from the surrounding environment without the heavy lifting of having to create the environment. There are so many tools in Thea that would make you eye roll at CA...CA doesn't compare, it simply can't...and when you really get good at Thea results can be had in a very short amount of time. I still prefer using CAs PBR for my business model, it's right in front of me so to speak...it also differentiates a tier for the next level of services or LOD(level of detail)

Proof of concept(not perfect, i'll leave that to you David) and it can be very quick to achieve with a little fudging here and there: make your molding, set your roof eaves to square cut (plumb requires multiple moldings and more work as mentioned by kMo) set your molding upper portion to the shadow boards in the roof dbx. set molding lower to frieze on gable only add a molding polyline for the intersecting band fudge your molding numbers as needed to have the band cover the bottom of the frieze on the gable end hornstein.plan notice we don't have a clean 45 all the way through the banding, it jogs..to make it perfect requires two upper moldings, one for the gable and one for the eave on a plumb cut eave( you can fudge this by making offset roof overhangs)

VERY COOL, CAN'T WAIT!

Add a vote for Thea, plugins for most 3d softwares such as Sketchup runs off of GPU and CPU, one of the few that can..also has an add on that can be purchased to create your own render frm including utilizing external GPU's...pretty much the fastest render engine available that offers photo-realism....and its very affordable for someone offering rendering services as a business model samples:

Just opened the plan, its the shadow board creating that gap..had to delete the adjacent attic wall and balloon frame the second story

It should snap to the main layer, if you drag the plan past the wall does the gap disappear? that would fell you if its an issue with the plane

most likely a manually drawn roof plane that isn't reaching the wall's main layer, I did not modify the plans roof planes

Archard Existing.plan there you go, change the liv room to platform frame style(lowered the ceiling height, adjust things accordingly) removed some of the balloon walls, separated 2nd floor walls from attic walls, designated interior walls something to note, those windows in the loft seem to be a waterproofing pain in the butt being that close to the diaphragm(roof to wall connection etc.)

Glenn no worries and no real combativeness on my end, you're a great guy and I have much respect for your work...I am also happy to hear new methods and work them until I succeed with them, especially if someone tells me its a good method...the bleed, as I referred to it, as is my observation and frustration with using terrain breaks when I want a crisp retaining wall. Your example of drawing a retaining wall perpendicular to an elevation line I think would be a problem for a terrain break as well, the elevation line needs to be cut and manipulated to properly convey the landscape. Neither tool is a bandaid that can fix an end-user not properly establishing his terrain me thinks So how would one make a terrain retaining wall on a project such as this? I truly am unaware of the method..a terrain break and a fence? this terrain was done very quickly and easily using retaining walls...At first thought it seems like it would be an immense chore to accomplish without the retaining wall tool. I don't see it, lack of knowledge on my part See how the grass is a rolling hill but the pavement has less movement, it's more of a linear slope...that's one of the biggest challenges for another approach in my mind.

If you wanna post the images I can do it for you very quick

Per usual I love your style.... Is there a specific reason for giving so much information, I've never shown nearly this level of detail and callouts yet I push 4-5 plans through the county per month? If my framer can't figure out how to frame a rake wall he can get lost! I call out wall framing and top plate connections in a wall detail and floor members in a plan view etc.

Bounding box is separate from the issue here, PNG files allow for transparent backgrounds, your source file is a jpg and does not have a transparent background...You may need a photo editor to delete the white background and save as a png..then make sure png is check in the image dbx within CA

For this particular case I see the terrain break being an option but look at the bleed through of the terrain...how do you do the other side where it is just a straight wall?... that's also a heavily stepped set of courses to cover the terrain breaks flaws as well...terrain breaks don't precisely cut even when you set it to 0, not like a retaining wall will do...and it wouldn't even be an option if we had additional slope going in multiple directions...I'd have to stick to my guns here, terrain break is a solid method to learn, ...add the molding(nice idea) for the course work and it is fool proof.. take these for example, so much easier using the terrain retaining wall:

Chief runs brilliantly in a touch screen environment especially for field measurement- The next Surface Book should be a killer- Macbook is certainly a nice machine, not a great value IMO. I currently use an iPad Pro remoted into my desktop for offsite work

agreed

actually I think it only works on a terrain retaining wall

Long story short there are no options, you would have to manually drag your leaders up, I wouldn't expect this to change for years to come because of the way text is formatted separate from a text box.

5935 Olde Atlanta Pkwy.plan think thats it

Maybe even easier, open the wall DBX. and change to a pony wall with the upper wall type being your cap