pgjacob

Looks like another rendering technique will be needed for large areas, so "Learn Thea Rendering" has now moved up on my TO DO list!

NO tweaks. But here is a backdrop just FYI. Sincerely appreciate it.

thank you! So it is some artifact in the ray trace. I started tinkering with Thea. Looks like I am going to tinker some more. Everything looks more realistic, the cars look great. melissa

Not sure how to zip materials..

Wow, that would be much appreciated. Attached is zipped file of 2 3DS files, one with terrain, one without. This is SUPPOSED to be a 10 acre lot with one storefront building, 4 warehouses and some retention ponds, which I am still working on, the water looks goofy. Terrain is hilly, this is Austin. This is the first project I have done with this big of a terrain perimeter...luckily with the experts here I got rid of my floating warehouses and made separate plans for the warehouses, exported them as 3DS files and imported them in to the master plan. The storefront and roadways/parking lots, terrain perimeter, landscaping (or my attempt at it), ponds and cars are in the original .pln. I think I have to change my signature to include "CA Forum ROCKS" melissa CA_Thea_no_terrain.zip

Yes, it is a very large terrain perimeter, multibuilding lot. I will try out changing terrain. thanks as always to all

I just upgraded recently. I attach the screenshot of the version.

Hi all I have a HUGE black spot in ray trace. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance melissa

Ok, y'all all rock. Thanks for the trees! I never thought I'd be so happy to get a tree! melissa

Wow! Thanks Greg! All those leaves! Truly appreciate it. melissa

Hi All Anyone have a good 3D plant image (sketchup) of an Itlalian Cypress, "thin, modern and young" according to my client (and my personal aspirations....). CA has kinda cheesy ones.... thanks in advance, melissa

Thanks, I had a second floor on the structure somehow. So I started over and did as suggested and it works now. No more levitating objects... thanks as always

Yes I am a dummy. I see now the dialog for absolute and relative. But I am putting what I think should be the answer and I still get a tall building. Floor (C) absolute is at -1050. And I want a 200" tall building (F)= 200". So Absoute Ceiling (B) is -850. So I should have a building on the terrain (which is at -1050) and bee 200" tall I think. BUt I get this...

Thanks, that's what I was beginning to do. Except now my buildings are TALL. I want a overall height of about 200". Floor is at -1060. So are ceiling heights relative or absolute?

Hi All I have a plan where I am putting several buildings on a hilly terrain. Most of these buildings are floating. I have tried the uncheck automatic automatic building pad. Any advice? thanks in advance

I got a response from Tech support. See Below. But try increasing roughness in x10 above 50% for materials. This did seem to help some. Thank you for sending in all this information.I will say right now I have passed this along to our development team to look at, but I do know that changes were made to materials and how they work with ray traces in X10 which from my understanding could be why you are seeing more speckles to begin with and slower rendering times. Basically in the latest build of Chief Architect (20.1.0.43) if the roughness of a material is under 50% you will get reflections which slow down the ray trace and cause more speckling. Materials that you don't need to have perfect reflections on you could modify to have a roughness over 50% which will speed up the ray traces.You could also try doing a longer ray trace (at least 20 passes) and see if it begins to clear up with X10. Though I would suggest trying to option above first and see how it goes. Feel free to post those results of longer ray traces as well and I will make sure those get passed along to development as well.I hope this information is helpful.

Thanks again to all the replies. I am now understanding these levels of products. Like the guy that I originally referred to is going to be happy with a CA render, one or two views for a flyer for a real estate product. Others that are happy to pay for more views and maybe material/color testing still using CA, and then the higher level of photo realistic images, for which I will need to invest some time. This has all been very helpful, and I have begun to delve into the latter, with my tail in between my legs.... seeing others expertise is daunting, but I do enjoy this enough to try. melissa

Thanks to all for replies. I agree, very nice renders. Just shows I still have lots to learn. I have now begun looking into post-CA rendering techniques and am baffled. Thea was mentioned, I downloaded the KerkyThea. I understand there will be a learning curve. But this seemed a little clunky. Thea Render has different versions. Which to use?

Hi All I was wondering about your thoughts on pricing for rendering services. I am just starting out and doing some pro bono work to build up my portfolio. For one of my clients I provided what I WOULD have charged him, and I based this, maybe naively, on $/sq. foot of project, complexity of structure, inside/outside or both. Again, this work was free for this guy. Once he saw the price tag, he said no one would pay that. Essentially I charged 25 cents/sq foot (simple structure, only exterior, duplex townhome so half of sq foot is easily replicated, simple terrain) + $500 for unlimited testing/views for 30 days. It was about $2300 for two 3600 sq. ft. duplex townhomes (7200 sq. ft.). I helped with exterior color selections by providing him with different renderings side by side. So part of this exercise was me testing the waters to see what was a fair and reasonable price. The client said I should google renderings and see, and he said $500 or so should be enough. I did see that some firms charge $500/image. So I guess if I provided 12 images, that would be $6000...I have seen some websites that say about 1-2% of the construction costs for rendering services. In designing our home, we reached out to a company to do some renderings and the estimate was $3000+ for 5 images. Then I upgraded to CA vs. Home Designer and said I could to it myself... I know alot of this is subjective. But I have to start somewhere with concrete data and sq. footage seemed to be where to start. Thanks melissa

Yes, got it! I restarted and re-downloaded. But I have it. Thanks!

I agree looks great. I downloaded but can't find it in my user catalog...I also downloaded RL-inc's metal panel and it showed up in the user catalog... any suggestions? But I had JUST finished making my own panel and then this reply came in. I did a combination of wall material regions (multiple copy including a gap) and then took a snip of this in PBR, and used as a material to paint entire exterior. Then used wall material region for cedar to make thicker. I think turned out pretty nice, but now I would like to try rlacklore's panels.... As always, great help here.

Hi All I have three questions...y'all have been so helpful, so I give you a 3 for one deal today! 1) I am trying to create seams in hardie siding. I have attached the reference photo (grey area). The Hardie material is already in the catalog, and it "paints" well with no seams, which is usually how I prefer, but in this case I need to create the seams and see each individual panel. I tried to alter the material definition, and I created a new material with a border but both didn't work well. 2) Also, this same photo shows cedar panels that are thicker than the Hardie. The cedar is on it's own floor, so these areas are already separated by floor. I tried having a thicker wall type but the walls were skewed (one jutted out). I see in material definition that there is a thickness area available,but it doesn't seems to change visually. 3) Finally, the windows in the photo are really reflective. I like this effect. I am not seeing this in my ray trace so (after a suggestion from tech support) I put a polyline in front of the building and painted a backdrop to give the windows something to reflect but it didn't work so well. Then I had to learn about refractive index from Wikipedia, and I had to take a nap. Can I get the windows to reflect more? Water is more reflective than diamond? Or vice versa... Any suggestions? Thanks in advance melissa

thanks to all! Very helpful. I will continue to refer to this post for help in future.

Hi All I am wondering if there are any suggestions for making an exterior ray trace a little less "cartoony". Some of the interior ray traces I have done look almost like a photo. But my exteriors are kinda blah. I have had to downgrade to X9 because of poor ray traces. I have attached a pic and the zipped plan. I have tried to add textures where I can, and I have mapped the house to the GPS and am using sun angles. I also think it helps when you add landscaping and lighting, for some reason. But this current plan I just can't seem to take from Warner Brothers to Pixar. Thanks in advance melissa steward 146.zip

Got it! Thanks!