Renerabbitt

On 5/12/2017 at 0:19 PM, MicahPaul said:

I have a set of plans that I have designed in Home Designer Architect.  I need a realistic rendering of these plans.  I believe this can be done by using a feature call Raytrace.  The feature is available on a much more expensive version of the software than what I have.  Would anyone with the Chief Architect software be willing to help me out.  Also how much would you charge for such a service? Thank you for your help.

 

MicahPaul

I offer rendering services as well, shoot me a pm

18 hours ago, HumbleChief said:

Red slot - is that good or bad? And if it's good how is it good and what operation(s) would it effect? Do you have a good guess? Or where might we find out how things are effected and by what?

The red slots are your Sata 3 slots, the blacks are the much slower sata 2... so it's good that you have them plugged into the red....

general note on this topic, I think it stands to reason that a heavier investment in coding from chief could speed everything up... ever notice how an apple iPhone can suddenly become faster or slower on each new iteration of its OS... they either fix or add bugs... cleaner codes, no redundancy, better implementation... you could see your hardware fly again if chief refined its coding... which it would probably happily do if it's client base met the demand... I hope we get there

on a side note, how is your dual processor set up? Do both processors compete for the ram and hard drive, I think I remember their being several ways to implement dual processors and sometimes they can be a detriment as they try and fight for resources dependent on the setup

6 hours ago, HumbleChief said:

...and why doesn't Chief at least throw us bone? Disk operations affect this; CPU operations affect this: GPU operations affect this. If you want faster 'this' then do 'this'.

 

There is obviously a LOT more going on than just CPU for RayTracing and GPU for 3D Rendering as is the common wisdom here.

is your 850 pro fed into the red sata slot? or the black ones

4 hours ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

 

I'm becoming suspicious that there may be a conflict with some other process when the 3D Model Rebuild is running. When I monitor things Chief goes into a "not responding mode", This usually indicates that something is requesting something from Chief and Chief is not responding to the request. It could be a shared resource that is working on something else and therefore Chief can't proceed until it has finished with it's other task.

After digging a bit and analyzing my own systems, I came to realize that my laptop's speed on the grandview plan is very formidable. Without digging in too much, I think it may have to do with my distribution. I have one of those lightning fast samsung 950 m.2 drives as the OS, but my temp and undo folder are set on my secondary drive. When I delete in the Grandview plans I see spikes from the CPU, and both hard drives. If I set the undo folder to its default, the OS harddrive spikes quite a bit more. Maybe the hard drive is the bottleneck for some systems

On 3/7/2017 at 3:25 PM, jonboy112352 said:

Properties 

Intensity  44-48

Softness 0

color 0

 

Brightness 47 -48

Contrast 52-54

Saturation 47-48

 

Light

Ambient Occlusion  .02    high 6.

Nothing else    a bit or trial and error

this is looking pretty darn good, two suggestions, put one of the eased edge moldings on your countertop to soften it up a bit, and add a bump map to the carpet..you can grab a simple one by googling carpet bump map

2 minutes ago, HumbleChief said:

The terms might get a bit confusing here but I use the term 'Render' to denote the 3D rotational views that Chief Architect generates to view 3D models, and the term RayTrace to denote those 3D views that are set to be set to a photo image. I'm not saying that's the correct uses of those terms and I know they are interchanged a lot to talk about 2 different things.

 

I use Chief for everything and the 'Rendering' that Chief does seems to be easily handled by the newer video cards. I think the 1080 is actually overkill for Chief and its 'Rendering' mode.. I don't RayTrace much anymore but Thea uses the graphics card to RayTrace and not the CPU as Chief does?

All understood, yes the 1080 is certainly overkill for chief, nice for Lumion or Thea though. Thea uses CPU and GPU together in their new rendering engine Presto, which tickles the heck out of me. Your particular setup is similar to mine and just flies in Thea(with a few trade tricks). Biggest benefit for me personally is the power consumption and temparature stability. I have a mini-itx water cooled xeon with that card in it and the 980 ti used to bring the temp of all the components up to 70-80 celsius in a hurry. Now with the 1070 its a cool machine. 

4 minutes ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

 

Locking layers has no effect. It appears to be the number of layers in use and the number of elements on the layer that dictates what has to be processed. I have tested this over and over with the same result. The only hick-up that I can find is that for some reason CA performs a model rebuild even though there is no 3D model being displayed and it only seems to happen with certain elements and not always every time.

 

You can turn off the Auto Rebuild but some functions like undo/redo override this and force a rebuild.

So often in plan sets I don't need wall or flooring layers, I suppose you could make a streamlined base plan by deleting underlayments in room specs and creating wall assemblies without any layers...this is all good info, thank you!

On 4/28/2017 at 11:45 AM, HumbleChief said:

I installed my new 1080 and really noticed no difference in rendering over my older 780. I'll not purchase the best Graphics card again as I din't Chief benefits that much from a super fast processor. A 1070 or even a 1060 should be plenty for Chief.

what program are you using to render? chief is CPU based, whereas you would see a huge improvement over the 780 with Thea's Presto engine. Plus the Pascal architecture of the new card draws less juice and runs super cool even after 24 hours of rendering....my 1070 never breaks 30 degrees Celsius vs my 980 ti that consistently gets into 80 degrees Celsius after just 2 hours

Even with an overclocked 14 core xeon my system lags when rebuilding a complex model, as Humble chief mentioned the cores don't necessarily matter though I thought the massive cache that comes with these high core count cpu's would make a difference. After reading these posts I'm curious to see if locking layers would help anything and/or if manually rebuilding would change anything...One of my biggest gripes is the lack of an UNDO drop down history list, so I could scroll to the change state I want to revert back to

It took a very long time to be what I would consider "decent" at terrain...one thing I believe to be true as someone kind've hinted at, is that you have to look at the terrain model as an art piece. Lines need to flow, elevation markers have no place in the model, you must shift elevation splines to make contours that make sense in terms of molding a piece of clay. ACCURACY COMES AFTER YOU HAVE MOLDED EVERYTHING. Make sure your intervals are set for larger spacing and your terrain details set to low or medium while you are working the model. Also copy and past your splines instead of drawing new splines and this will help keep the model uniform while you set things in place. Often times you can set more splines then necessary and after you have your basic contours in place you can delete them and the model will hold together. Manipulate the terrain with a 3D view in a second window to track the changes...I've attached a couple of examples of some more difficult terrain models as well as one I am currently working on, each of which had their aggravating moments

Mark I love this, what a fun project, so much more love goes into a project when you have to accommodate 19 of your best friends  

Sounds like their are multiple problems here, a couple of thoughts regarding multiple topics within this thread: 

1) Camera view options still exist under the 3d Tab including turning off shadows

2) I would turn off all enhancements in 3d view by selecting the camera and opening it/unchecking bloom etc.

3) Turn off ambient occlusion for greater stability

4) Tune your system for running processes, ray-tracing is very taxing on a system, check services tab and clean up. Possibly set priority of chief architect to high in task manager

5) Limit raytrace to use 2-3 cores for your raytrace to test stability

6) Update to Windows 10, it will speed your old girl up in many ways and has better implementation for RAM designation. Other people know more than I do, chime in.

7) Reset all setting in chief? backup first

9) Update your BUS and chipset drivers, as other people have said, ray-trace is CPU

and good luck! your system is plenty powerful enough, biggest recommendation would be windows 10

Client just requested that I design one of these in to her new kitchen, I imagine I could figure out a few different configurations but I'm always on the lookout for better ideas. Maybe a toe kick drawer with food dishes, automated food dispenser etc...does anyone have any experience with this, any bright ideas?

You can also use the iPad Pro with desktop software "duet" or teamviewer to use the desktop as a server and the iPad as a client. It works quite well with the right networking setup...

Diane, more specifically, Joe is looking for object layer properties to see if you possible have these walls on a layer other than the standard "walls, foundation" layer. Care to share your plan file so we can take a look? 

3 hours ago, contractcad said:

I did revisit my 1st and 2nd floor walls on the east side and noted that I had the 2ND floor wall was mis-aligned E to W by 2 inches in relation to the 1st floor wall. But still not my problem with the losing my 1st floor slab when deleting features. Still not figuring this out.

Send me a PM when you get a chance, lets hop on a remote viewing session and I'll get you headed the right direction

18 minutes ago, chief58 said:

I went with the ASUS ROG g751jy 17"  notebook and haven't regretted it from Amazon

+1 I've got the G752VL, added an M.2 950 pro and it boots to chief in 20 seconds.

You can share the file so we can take a look and possibly fix it for you, happy to check it out.

 A new one

modeled in chief x8, rendered in Thea, Post production in procreate, 14 hours from a PDF set of drawings.

Hey Joe, 

Is there a way to set that macro as a default in the layout box label?

I've been working on a basement ADU and been avoiding the parameters that trigger an AUP, which from my understanding takes nearly half a year to get through the city of Berkeley. On a side note, the parking parameters are still a bit more stringent than spelled out in the from "Kathleen Pender" quote. Existing dwelling units will still require additional off street parking if the property is outside of the half mile mark and doesn't meet all of the criteria laid out in the new codes. My particular project is being designed with a "wet bar" and "office in leau of a kitchen and bedroom respectively, so that I can get it through the city and built. Afterward my client will start the process for the ADU so that the space can be inhabited while Berkeley catches up to its huge backlog.

1 hour ago, Greg_NY61 said:

3D warehouse has a huge Simpson hanger collection made by Simpson manufacturer. 

had no idea, thank you!

3 minutes ago, HumbleChief said:

Still impressed...

haha, cheers!

50 minutes ago, HumbleChief said:

VERY Impressive indeed. Nice work Renerabbit and I really have no idea how you did that but again nice job. Could you share the plan or a tutorial on how that might be accomplished?

Thank you, I can't do a tutorial at the moment and don't have the plan file for that oven anymore just a thea object file. Here is a quick snapshot of a crude recreation of the oven handle. Basically created a cross cut sectional of the handle and added it to the library as a molding polyline. Then the circle next to the sectional is a 3d molding polyline with that newly created molding. You can see the result in the orthographic viewing window. I then added the handle to my library as a symbol where you can rotate and turn any direction that you need. same for the cooktop trays, just one big molding that was drawn as a polyline, converted to molding, and then wrapped around a circle. The size of the polyline circle can be changed but I often adjust the size by playing with horizontal offsets instead. Hope that made sense

6 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

 

That's pretty impressive.  Nice work Renerabbit! 

 

I'm agreement that Chief isn't the easiest thing to model with, but as you've just demonstrated, almost anything is doable.  I would also argue that for a person who becomes comfortable with Chief's way of doing things, it doesn't necessarily even take longer than using some of the other apps.  I think that same model would have taken a proficient Sketchup user a good 4 hours or more to model as well.  I know I personally actually prefer Chief or Sketchup.  Now if only Chief would allow us to convert moldings to solids...

Appreciated, the handles in this model were all moldings that were wrapped around a circle polyline and then converted to a symbol... I always keep a blank plan open to add a quick symbol on the fly :)....the main thing that is lacking for me in chief is the ability to create complex 3d shapes like textiles, but that was never really chief's intent...though I suppose if it is to remain competitive through the years to come it will have to adapt these tools as Johnny mentioned