Rich_Winsor

Wow! That was interesting. If you have a 3D Connexion mouse try navigating the forum with it. Tilting forward & back scrolls up and down and Spinning left and right widens or shrinks the screen.

Look them up on Amazon. They have them in stock and a lot cheaper than the Best Buy prices you cited. Wired - $ 93 Wireless - $ 121 Free Shipping included.

Actually there is one setting you can control in X8. Check the "Render" settings in Preferences. I find the "Rotate about Camera Focal Point" to be more like the behavior of Chief's Mouse-Orbit Camera tool.

Thanks for confirming the behavior Barton. I can't believe more people aren't up in arms about this. Trying to accurately drag the slider in 1% increments with the mouse or manually entering every change by keyboard just aren't viable options if you are trying to compare how small adjustments in the sliders are reflected in the current Ray Trace image. Anyhow, I submitted it as a bug in my first ever Chief Support Case. We shall see what the powers that be have to say. With all the nice new features they have introduced with this release it would be a shame if we have to take a step backwards in productivity with this change.

Just ran my 1st Ray Trace in X8 and I am experiencing some unexpected behavior. Wondering if anybody else is experiencing this? When making adjustments in the "Image Properties" dbx all the slider bars are now moving in 10% increments. This happens either when using the left & right arrows on the keyboard or when clicking the mouse to the left or right of the slider button. In X7 this these techniques would result in 1% increment changes. I hope this is a bug as this new behavior makes it very hard to work in increments smaller than 10%. You can get increments smaller than 10% by dragging the slider button with the mouse but this method is imprecise and takes an inordinate amount of effort. Try setting the General Properties sliders to the amounts pictured in the thumbnail and see if you get similar results.

What the hey! A flying buttress tool would be neat too... but how often would we really use it? http://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/visit/tour/

I've had X8 Beta installed for about 2 minutes now and I can tell you that the improved function of the Mouse-Orbit Camera ( ) isfantastic. You can now literally walk your way thru the plan (inside and out) and easily get views that would have taken you dozens of camera placement adjustments in the past. Now I find X7 impossible to work with. This feature alone is worth the upgrade for me.

Have y’all ever actually checked out the accuracy of the views that Chief’s Perspective Overview Cameras generate? Maybe it’s my suspicious (take nothing for granted) nature but I was compelled to drag a screen shot into PSP and lay out the perspective guide lines on the image. I’m happy to report that Chief’s view appears to be spot on, displaying none of the common sources of perspective error. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

As well you should be! Sheesh, you could have sugar coated it a little bit for me. There was actually a Richard Head attending my high school. And Johnny Cash thought a boy named Sue was bad. Now that we are completely off topic, and on a different subject altogether, I have always wondered how you Aussie's regard your neighbors to the South in Tasmania? Are they your good mates, or are they regarded more as the red headed step children?

Many nice things going on in this shot Jon and I know you are not necessarily looking for a critique.... but to my eye, that little swatch of bright green in the carpet in the foreground is a distraction. It seems out of place with all of the nice warm tones going on.

I guess my knowledge of the vernacular of Oz is woefully limited. I can speculate but since it bears my namesake I'd love to know the derivation and meaning of "having the Richard".

Here I've had a play with giving several of Chief's standard library items a "reflective metallic look". If this is on the right path experiment with using the Adjust Material Definition (rainbow tool) to set the Material Class to Shiny Metal and in the Define Material dbx start with; Specular - 50%, Roughness - 0% and Reflection - 85%. These settings should get you in the ballpark.

Coincidentally that's about what I have in to Microsoft Solitaire. Hey! Maybe that would explain my lack of productivity.

I don't know if it's a Mac thing or just a case of user error, but this is how I get the Jing videos to run in full screen mode on my PC.

They tried changing the gas pumps to liters (or was that litres?) here a while back. I think it lasted about six months. It's not that we can't change to metric but rather we don't want to change. Besides Imperial has a nice ring to it. Heck, you metric guys are so screwed up you probably only get 10 eggs in a dozen.

Everything is relative. Just by way of perspective, this is what renewing my SolidWorks seat will run me. Somehow 5 bills doesn't seem that bad to me. Hope you're right D Scott.

Funny (odd, not funny ha ha) that after all these years of Microsoft selling us their operating system and including the games for free, now they want to give us the operating system for free and charge us for the games. Well I'll be dad gummed if I'm going to log on as a guest on my own computer just to play some watered down game version fraught with advertising. Fortunately in this day and age there seems to be a hack for everything and this little program will restore your classic Windows 7 games on your Windows 8 or 10 rig. http://winaero.com/blog/get-windows-7-games-for-windows-10/ Just scroll down and follow the 3 steps outlined. I downloaded and unzipped the files on a flash drive and ran the setup program from there without any problems. An interesting side note: Apparently Windows 10 doesn't completely remove the games when it upgrades a Windows 7 system because when I opened the newly accessed games in Windows 10 my results history for the games was still there intact.

I like the Chief version better. That floor is awesome.

https://3dlibrary.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?r=site/detail/922

Ray, check out this link. You can create an installation DVD and install Win 10 from that when you are ready. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

One of the annoying side effects of using Chief is that I am always looking at building techniques and wondering how I would accomplish modeling them with Chief. Here is a sketch I dashed off of a building I saw while watching TV. I was intrigued by the way the lower part of the second story wall kicks out and provides an overhang to support the gutter which in turn merges seamlessly with the gutter of the Gable roof. It was no mean feat to get all the disparate elements including roof pitches, fascia heights and shingle texture scale and location to match up and form the shingled second story wall with a continuous gutter. The whole time I was modeling my sketch I was wrestling with the question: Are these second floor dormers or is this just a two story rectangular box with a Gable roof straddling the top? (I modeled it as the latter)

Kool stuff guys. Joe, if I may ask, how do you handle roof runoff on those structures? It seems to me that there would be a virtual torrent cascading down onto those nice flower beds.

Wow! I am such a lightweight. 4 days and 500 passes? How hot was the laptop after that stint? Maybe it's my short attention span but I never let them run anywhere near that long. With Ray Traces it seems that I am constantly fighting the laws of diminishing returns. Can you still discern changes in the image quality after so many passes?

Hey Cristian, It looks like you are trying to achieve a "chrome" effect while in Standard View. I doubt that you will ever get the effect you want there. To get a realistic chrome you need to do a Ray Trace. Some of the qualities you need like Reflection only apply to Ray Traces. Here is a sure fire way to get a good chrome effect. In the Define Material dbx go to the Properties tab and set the Material Class to Shiny Metal. Set the Roughness level to 0. Set the Reflection level to somewhere in the 80 to 100% range. Specular isn't as critical and you can try different values but start around 50%. Now when you run a Ray Trace you will have shiny reflective chrome. By way of an example, here I have changed a marble vase from the Browser Library to chrome.

BUMP! Any information on the workings of the Pattern and Texture settings in the Define Material (rainbow tool) dbx (and how they affect that infernal teapot) would be welcome.