Rich_Winsor

Took the Bimmer i8 (from the BMW Manufacturer Catalog) out for a spin last night. I'd have to say these are some very nice symbols with a dozen materials that can be changed entirely or have their properties altered. As always 100% Chief output.

In the Rendering Techniques Options dbx you need to uncheck "Opaque Window Glass.

Here's a quick stab made by creating custom muntins for the window Lites. It's a bit of an tedious and not too precise process but you can get pretty close to what you want.

Looks to me like the magic number is 2/3. Try using Transform Replicate to reduce the original by that amount.

I think this could be a karma issue. Chief could be getting even with you for championing the cause of other vendor's exotic render engines. Seriously I don't think I've seen that one before but it's hard to tell because for some reason the text in the dbx's in your screencast videos doesn't display cleanly for me. Not sure what causes this as I am using the highest quality video settings and I haven't experienced this behavior with other posters videos. (see thumbnail).

LOL! I have to admit I was having a Pygmalionesque moment while I was converting her image to a transparent background. By way of perspective this is what the front porch looked like after the owner had "cleaned" it up before we had a walkthru to check out the property. As is customary AAA issued the Homeowners Insurance Policy Binder sight unseen. After they sent out an agent to view the house first hand they told us the binder was good for 30 days but after that they were going to decline to issue the policy. Fortunately I have a pretty good relationship with my agent and he agreed to let me get the place squared away before they pulled the plug on me. I thru up some plywood sheathing and sent him this picture and AAA issued the policy. Sure the house is a little rough but the entry doors are plumb and square and seem to be top notch quality. You have to start somewhere.

So, here is my humble dream, my vision if you will for the front porch, entry and foyer of our modest farm house. This is a 100% Chief generated Ray Trace image. No artificial additives or ingredients. Everything in the image is stock generic Chief content from the Library Browser with the exception of the beveled and leaded glass in the door and the young lady which are 2D images I added to the User Catalog. I let this one cook for 100 passes which took a little under 2 hours. I threw just about everything at this image. Photon Mapping, Caustics, Ambient Occlusion, you name it. No Bloom or Focal Blur however as I wanted a nice crisp image to draw the viewer in.

image #2 looks like a tough neighborhood. I'd try crossing over to the other side of the street. Seriously, care to post a plan and we'll have a play with it.

Actually things like power lines are a bit problematical in Chief. They aren't straight lines and they aren't really arcs either. They are catenaries. Perhaps we should request a Catenary Tool. It would work for everything from clotheslines to suspension bridges.

It used to happen quite a bit and then it seemed to be rectified. Seems to be happening again but to a lesser degree. The one thing you can be sure of is that the more time you have into composing the perfect response, the greater the chance it will evaporate into the ether when you hit the post button. All I can say is save yourself some aggravation and hit the copy button before you hit the "Send" or "More Reply Options" buttons.

I've had a play with that. I posted this image (or a similar one) in the "Show your Goodies" thread many moons ago. As I recall it went over like the proverbial lead balloon.

As with anything in the Library Browser you must know what Chief chose to call it if you hope to ever find it. The winning search term is "power pole".

Dare I say it?... ...cool like a yeti eating frozen spaghetti.

What's wrong with Windows 10? Do you mean besides the fact that it is the most intrusive invasive inflexible autonomous software to be unleashed upon the general public to date? Between software like this and "cloud" storage we might as well just pack up all our sensitive personal information and sent it straight to Bill & Melinda. If you want a computer that starts and stops when it feels like it. Updates itself with whatever it wants whenever it wants and takes it upon itself to reverse changes you try to make to it then Windows 10 will be just the ticket for you. And who at Microsoft thought that adding an additional step to the shut down procedure was a productive improvement? BTW, Windows 10 Home is an extremely egregious offender.

Hey Chop, I feel your pain. I had a similar experience. I wish I could tell you that I was in total control but truth be told I was just trying to make sure that all the surfaces of the P-Solids matched the wall and window surfaces. The Vector view hadn't been clean and I wasn't too optimistic that it was going to get any better, but when I brought it up it was clean so I did what anybody would do. I pulled a screen shot to prove it and posted the result just like I knew what I was doing.

That's outright creepy. If I wasn't afraid of spiders before I will be now. By the way, is it bad luck to walk under a giant spider? Apparently the city paid $400,000.00 for the spider and a mural which was included in the 12 million dollar budget for the parking garage. Pretty pricy for some public art but I like it better than a lot of the bent up, rusted piles of scrap metal that are passed off on us as art.

Had a quick play with your plan. Cleaned up a few issues and finished off your "glass box" on the roof. Your hole in the roof was considerably larger than I had envisioned. Hope this helps you out. issue.plan

You need to highlight the roof plane that you want to put a hole in and then click on the Polyline Subtraction icon. Can't seem to find the plan, not sure if I saved it, but here is the process I used.

Not sure what you are referring to. If you want to put a raised edge on the flat portion of the roof just draw a line around the edge of the roof plane in plan view and convert it to a Molding Polyline or a 3D Molding Polyline. Then you can assign to it whatever molding profile you like. Here I added an approximately 20cm x 20cm (8" x 8") border to the roof plane. xxx

Anybody have one? Check out this guy. Recently he just showed up on a wall at a local parking garage. This will give you some idea of scale. He's way to big to have come up thru a manhole cover. I'll have to go by at night some time to see if he lights up. Maybe Greg will make a symbol for me.

Hey Glenn, you would be better off posting this in the General Q&A section. But that being said I think you can get what you are after. Here I used Polyline Subtraction to put a hole in the flat section of the roof (manually draw this roof plane and set it's pitch to 0). Then I went up to the second floor and built a little room around the hole. Change the Room Type to "Open Below". Put windows in the four walls and changed the roof material to Standard Glass. Put P-Solid frame around the top.

Don't know where those salmon colors are coming from. Here is a really vanilla 10 pass Ray Trace. Your special siding texture didn't come thru with the plan but this should get you pointed in the right direction. Launch the Assistant. Outdoor/High Quality In the Edit/Lighting bump the direct sunlight to 4.0 In Image Properties uncheck "Use Tone Mapping"

Sorry for the tardy response but my nocturnal proclivities sometimes don't lend themselves to immediate responses. Although, like Larry, I don't like to be coy about revealing methods of work in this case I was responding to the nature of the OP's specific request "Anyone care to actually make a real window do this so I know its actually possible? Which seemed to me to imply "if" rather than "how" it could be done. Anyway, that all being said, there was no real mystery to the process. As several here have predicted the basic process involved creating the "rightside up" version of the window and then turning that into a symbol and then rotating the symbol 180° to get the angled side on the bottom. The problem with this is that the symbol cuts a square hole in the wall leaving an open triangle which needs to be filled manually. I tried a couple of approaches to filling this space including adding the triangular patch to the symbol as Joe suggested but I had problems getting interior and exterior textures and patterns to display properly in all views. In the end I used 2 triangular Polyline Solids to fill the gap. One the width of the exterior sheathing and one the width of the rest of the wall. This made it easy to match the materials of the interior and exterior walls. By tweaking the fit of the P- Solids I was finally able to get the window to display cleanly in Standard & Vector views but obviously it won't frame properly. So I guess the answer to the OP's request is it depends on what your ultimate goal is. The window can be made and it will display in 3D views, but basically it's an upside-down bassackwards symbol and the simple addition to the DBX requested by the OP is certainly a valid and helpful one.

It depends on what will pass for "actually possible" This is about as close as I can come. It displays OK in Standard View but looks pretty crappy in Vector View.

Welcome to the forum PGH. Don't take Solver's response so personally. There is a fairly longstanding issue with Home Designer product users mistakenly being directed to this forum which is for Chief Architect Premier users. This is not to say that you can't benefit from following this forum as HD Pro has many of the same features as Chief, but in regards to your specific request, I don't think you will find many people here with the time or inclination to read the HD Pro manual or figure out a HD Pro specific issue. Eric was merely trying to direct you to a forum that is more suited to responding to your questions.