Rich_Winsor

Or should I say why is it so hard to get good ray trace results? Well I have been doing a lot of ray tracing lately and I think I can put my finger on it now. Ray Tracing is akin to digital alchemy. You are presented with a palate consisting of an incalculable number of possibilities and you are tasked with finding just the right combination of these possibilities to create that “golden” image. I always assumed that there were lots of possible combinations but when I ran some numbers I was flabbergasted. Take the “Image Properties” dbx which is instrumental to all ray traces. Here we have 7 slider bars which each have 100 different selections that range from 0% to 100%. Now I’m no mathematician but to me that works out to making a selection of 7 settings out of a possible 700. So how many possible combinations are we talking about? 1.5 x 10 to the 16th power - Help me out here, is that 15,000,000,000,000,000 ? Holy sh$t! And you can double that number by simply selecting or deselecting the “Use Tone Mapping” option. These of course are global image settings and don’t even start to consider the possibilities of changes to individual item’s characteristics which depending on their Material Class include such as: Diffuse, Specular, Roughness, Emissive, Transparency, Translucency, Reflection or Index of Refraction. And then all of these possibilities can have different colors. Are we getting the picture yet? That is why Ray Tracing is so hard.

Hey Mickey, When I constructed my wall section I used different Polyline Solids for the cinder blocks and the mortar in between them. Then when you convert the model to a symbol you can assign different textures and colors to the individual parts. Now when you open the object you can change these features using the Materials tab. Cinder Block Wall.calibz

Here is a hint. The exact same car with the colors of the sky and concrete reversed: So what color is the car? That’s kind of hard to pin down. Let me try to explain how I arrived at the result in the OP. I started out to see if I could get one of the vehicles from the Library Browser to display more realistically in a ray trace. My idea was to place the library symbol on a piece of generic road and see if I could get the road stripes to reflect off of the rocker panels. To do this I obviously needed a more reflective surface than the OOB default supplied by Chief. Chief classifies the Material for the Body Color as a “General Material” and as such you can manipulate several characteristics but not specifically reflectivity. This got me thinking about what type of material would be more reflective and since I was working on a metal car with a shiny paint job I brilliantly deduced that what I needed was a “shiny metal” material. Well imagine my surprise when I opened the Material Class menu and, bingo, one of the choices was “Shiny Metal”. It turns out that one of the characteristics you can control with this class of material is “Reflection” although this can only be done in ray trace views. There is a sliding bar where you can adjust the amount of reflection form 0% to 100% and there is a corresponding color swatch which varies from black to white. Armed with this new material I set out to try a few test RT’s. Since I wanted a highly reflective surface I set “Reflection” to 75% and ran a test run. So here is the first answer to the question. The car I had displayed in the “Perspective Full Overview” camera view I was using for the ray trace was bright red but it turned out that didn’t matter. As the ray trace came into view I was puzzled but pleasantly surprised that the car looked really shiny but it was not red but rather had the blue and gray tones from the surrounding background and sky. Thinking I must have somehow altered the color I went back and opened the material for the car body but it was still bright red. I did a second ray trace and got the same results I had with the first one. Since it was obvious that something was overriding the car’s material color I tried clicking on the color swatch beside the Reflection slider and it opened the Color Selector dbx from whence I was able to change the car’s color. Anyhow, this is what I’ve learned. If you don’t supply a color and use the default black to white values on the Reflection slider you essentially get a clear reflective surface not unlike a chrome surface or a mirror as Jonathan predicted. Everything above the equator bulge of the car reflects the values of the sky and everything below the equator bulge reflect the ground colors. If you supply your own color you will then get a reflective colored surface. So what color is the car? It’s red, but it isn’t. It’s no color or any color. It’s basically like a chameleon; it takes on the color of its surroundings. Hope this isn't TMI. Top row: How cars display in Standard View Middle row: How cars display using default "Shiny Metal" color settings in ray trace Bottom row: How cars display adding color to "Shiny Metal" settings in ray trace

Thanks Michael, it really did turn out better than I thought it was going to. So here's the question for anybody out there (and it might be considered a trick question): What color is the car? Is it a blue car with gray reflections at the bottom or is it a gray car with blue reflections on the top?

That's a lot better than what I had with the wall tools Michael. If I had gotten that close I probably would have run with it. I haven't had a chance to look at your plan yet to see how you got the top of the wall to display properly. Anyway I'm happy with the wall symbol because it just looks more like a cinder block with nice crisp edges and there is the added bonus of being able to change the color of the mortar.

And if your lucky Jere, you won't ever see that construction. I'm not sure what is keeping the whole thing from flopping over. Believe it or not that pop out upper wall is basically cosmetic. I'm not sure what look they were going for. Sort of a poor mans "Falling Water". Unfortunately a more appropriate description would be "Falling Market Value". The cinder block sections have a rudimentary anchor for the vertical 4 x 12 posts. The vertical 4 x 12's have no hardware securing them to the horizontal 4 x 12's above them. In fact 2 of the horizontal roof support beams are not even seated on the corresponding vertical posts.

Well Mike, I don't have a clue how to pull that off using wall and roof tools. I can get you started on a basic shape by using primative cylinders and Solid Subtraction. You would probably have to build all the benches and such piece by piece.

Since I wanted to populate my carport model with somewhat believable automobiles I have been having a play with adjusting the properties of the different materials Chief offers on their Library Browser vehicle symbols. By changing things like material classes and adjusting the associated properties such as Specular, Roughness and Reflection you can coax some pretty nice results out of the OOB symbols.

Just an update for anyone who may be following along at home. Here is the completed carport with the funky cinder block wall segments. BTW, (standing up and shaking my fist at the monitor and probably about to regret making this statement ) I defy anybody to create that right side carport wall using Chief's wall tools and textures so that it will display properly in all view types. Here is a "crappy" 10 pass ray trace and the corresponding watercolor w/line drawing showing the results.

No need to type in the inches symbol here Gene. Just the number for a positive amount and a minus sign and the number for a negative amount.

Wow! I hate when that happens. Crazy how the sofa and end tables are completely untouched.

And people say that Chief's Cad tools aren't very good. Check out this front elevation of the Taj Mahal that I created using just the basic OOB Cad tools: Did I mention that I did it all using the invisible line style.

It is easier to find in the in the Library Browser.

Use the Multiple Copy menu that Michael pointed out and set your spacing to 2 1/4 like Jere said.

Amen Mike. As I mentioned, the little Pattern graphic sort of works that way but the Texture visuals in the dbx remain unsolvable to me. That teapot is a crock and the cube isn't much better. Anyhow, in this case my wall symbol functions just as I want it to so I will stick with that approach for now. Here is my wall symbol at work. Still haven't fleshed out the landscape but the structures are looking good.

Thanks for having a look Robert. You tweaked your texture settings more finely than I did but it looks like we have similar results. Pray tell, how did you calculate the amount of the texture X offset required? Or do you just do like I do and plug in some values and watch which way the Texture moves? I find the Pattern offsets are fairly straightforward and I usually get the anticipated results, but the Texture offsets and Scale settings are a mystery to me. I have no idea what they are in relation to. Is there some way to calculate the what the values should be other than by trial and error?

You know, it's funny how sometimes the most seemingly simple task can turn out to be an ordeal. I needed to model a short section of cinder block wall that is holding up a roof support beam in a carport (see first thumbnail) . Easy peasy, right? 21 blocks (14" long x 7 1/2" wide x 6" high) stacked in 3 columns. Well, after 45 minutes of futzing around with those confounded pattern and texture settings in the "Define Material" dbx I was still unable to get a wall that displayed properly with all the rendering techniques. Finally I just gave up and in about 15 minutes modeled the wall section out of Polyline Solids and converted it to a symbol. Not only does it display properly in all views but I can change the color of the grout if I choose to do so. Am I missing something? Is it possible to create this simple wall section using Chief's Wall tools?

Ray, It's part of the library core content. Check the path in the browser window in the thumbnail.

Don't know if this one will work for you but this 8 panel wide version is in the Library Browser.

Well shut my mouth wide open (whatever that means). Upon further review it appears as though the transfer speed for USB flash drives is indeed very much device dependent. While all my flash drives are USB 3.0 and they are all being plugged into an Intel USB 3.0 Root Hub there is quite a difference in performance from drive to drive. The drive that performed so poorly is an older one that has been beating around in my pocket so long that there are no identifiable markings on it any more. Windows says it is a Cruzer 8GB drive. I also tried the "save as" on an 8GB Transcend drive that took about 20 seconds and finally I did a "save as" to a spiffy SanDisk 64GB Extreme flash drive that lived up to its name by being almost instantaneous in completing the save (no more than 2 or 3 seconds). So I guess I should amend the tip to say that if you have a dog slow USB drive you can save yourself some time by using the Windows Explorer option.

If you have made the mistake of trying to use Chief to save a large plan file to a USB flash drive you already know what a time consuming process that can be. I don't know what the data transfer rate is for doing a "save as" from Chief's File drop down menu, but it is way slower than the transfer rate for using Windows Explorer to make the transfer. By way of a test I tried saving a 71.9MB plan file to my USB flash drive using Chief's save as function. The little teal whirligig sat there and spun for an agonizing 4 minutes and 50 seconds before the save was completed. By way of comparison transferring the same file from my desktop to the USB drive using Windows Explorer took only 29 seconds. So bottom line, it will save you a lot of time to save your file from Chief to some convenient location on your hard drive and then transfer the file to your USB flash drive using Windows Explorer. But then you probably already knew that.

Don't know about X2 but nowadays you have to hit the "Stop Ray Trace" icon. The escape key does not stop a Ray Trace.

As the killer in Dirty Harry says when he sees Clint's .44 Magnum; "My, that's a big one". I thought Jon was the unofficial leader in hard drive storage at 12 terabytes but 43+ Kad's sounds impressive. Not exactly sure where it fits into the list though.

I do much the same thing. When I start a plan I give it a name and assign it #1, for example Joe Blow's House-1. Then as I make any type of significant progress I immediately do a save as and assign it the next higher number in the sequence (i.e. Joe Blow's House-2). When the plan is done I do a final save as and just use the job name without a number ( Joe Blow's House). Now I have the plan and all the steps it took to arrive at the final version. If storage is an issue you can always go back and delete all the numbered iterations.

You might try downloading XVID. It's free. It was working fine for me with X6 but I haven't tried it since upgrading to X7. Doubt that there would be any problems.