Rich_Winsor

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.

Here are a couple of shots that afford the somewhat unique opportunity to show the same background in two different seasons.

I don't think you are going about it in the proper way. In keeping with the season here is what I would try. In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and owlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Seriously if the exact name does not return a result how are all the filter options in the world going to make any difference. As the Library continues to grow in size it is obvious that the search engine needs to be revamped. JMHO

It ain't just this forum. That guy seems to have his hands on everything.

Probably stating the obvious here but you can make adjustments in the Image Properties dbx on the fly so to speak and they update in the ongoing ray trace. Also as long as the ray trace window hasn't been closed you can also make adjustments after the ray trace has been stopped. This way you can display 2 ray traces side by side and still make adjustments to either one of them.

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