Michael_Gia

OP was asking for shadows in floorplan view, not a sun study. In Chief you can do something similar in an orthographic 3D overview. OP was looking for something like a drop shadow effect like in Photoshop. Feel better now?

I’m here to tell you, it’s not you. Chief is still unpredictable with curbs and automatically joining to roads and stuff. I take a different approach. I use a road with no curbs. Then I use a molding polyline to create the curb. This way I have complete control of how the curb is shaped in 3D space, independently of those dumb roads. On occasion I even have to use a slab for the road to avoid issues with complex intersections etc.

Dropbox works for us. (Watch how you name stuff, though) We are able to markup plans and documents and even add notes to documents that are shared with an “@person” which will notify them of a change. The only way you could do this sort of collaboration with Onedrive would be to setup a SharePoint site where all those sharing files are in the same organization. For current projects, I start the project folder name with an underscore “_” so they float to the top. Once the project is complete I remove the underscore to throw it into alphabetical order.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. Anybody working with Autocad deals with this sort of thing on a regular basis. The scale tool in Autocad can fix this in under 1/2 a second.

It's fixed now.

Howdie, When I export the 3D model to Autocad, it shows up as a 3D wireframe version of the model. The same model opens up with proper exterior surfaces in the free Autodesk viewer online, however. Is there a way to export to autocad with exterior surfaces as well, or is this a limitation of Autocad?

lol you guys all sound like, "the horseless carriage will never catch on", what if you run out of gas? Besides there aren't enough roads...

check out.... https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00038/resolving-a-gap-between-floors-in-camera-views.html

I’m curious, who is ever going to look at your truss drawings and actually use it to build or even install a truss? I realize some remote places don’t always have the benefit of a local truss manufacturer. As the Minnesotan mentioned, usually your truss company will have you approve their drawings and those drawings will accompany the delivery which any carpenter is already accustomed to reading. Are you just curious or are you going to manufacture those yourself. (cause I know some people do)

Pretty sure that just got imported as text.

The hardest thing in rendering is lighting and materials. Ai is great for that. As far as your background or anything else you want to control then you can just prompt the ai to “keep background”

We all know it’s coming. Archicad has introduced their version. I’d like to see the same in Chief…

I use an M3 pro Macbook pro with X16. Although I am able to do PBR (RTRT) it takes about a minute to render a view that takes the same view less than 3 seconds to render on an RTX 4060 laptop. Although the MacBook is a little snappier for creating and orbiting around standard render 3D models. I personally still find MacOS better than Windows 11 and the laptop experience is still clunky on Windows pc’s.

Change sun intensity to 7,000 You probably have it set to something like, daytime 100,000. Also, don’t use a sky as a background. Experiment with a more subdued background that’s more cloudy.

Don’t use auto-dormers. It’s mainly; - hole in roof - place walls - use the “lower wall type if split by butting roof” in the roof tab of the wall dbx. - use the “ballon through ceiling above” in the structure tab of the wall dbx. - manually draw your roof planes.

Way back when I wanted to switch to Archicad, I had reached out to an architect Archicad user and asked him if I could come to his office and watch him put together construction documents form concept, to 3d model to, floor plans and finally to a full set of construction documents on a small enough project that would take less than 1 day to complete. He agreed, I spent the day with him and saw the whole process from start to finish. I learned that I should stick with Chief but that's beside the point. I would suggest you try and do the same with a local Chiefer in your neck of the woods.

Oh god, I noticed that but I thought that it was just something that occurred because the original view was not sent as Plot Lines. Don't tell me this is a thing?...

OK! I changed all elevations to Plot Lines Color Fill = 30 seconds total to print to PDF Then chose Plot Lines Color fill for all 3D Camera Views (as well as all elevations) = 10 seconds total to print to PDF If I delete all my 3D Camera views = 3 seconds or less to print to PDF TL:DR PC and Mac both print to PDF in under 3 seconds unless you start adding live link standard render views to your layout. I guess a good tradeoff is to keep the live 3D views but at least make sure your elevations and cross sections should be Plot Lines (30 seconds to print vs over a minute)

The 3D views are just Standard Render mode which are updated on the Layout on demand, is what I meant to say. The reason is simply so that they reflect the latest change in the plan. That is I don't have to constantly take screenshots and replacing 3D images on the Layout. I guess I will try to print to pdf without all those Camera Views and see what happens. Thanks a million for the feedback.

I can confirm that the Bachelor View Layout takes around 3 seconds to print to PDF on my Mac. Haven't tried it on the PC but I'm sure it will be similar. Therefore there is definitely something gravely wrong with what I'm doing in my layout files to take so long to print. and I've had this issue since X14. I'm doing something wrong. I did notice that in the Bachelor View Layout, every 3D image is a png, every elevation is "Plot Lines" and the rest is Cad Details, Text boxes or Saved Plan Views. In my Layouts, every 3D image is a Full Cavera Live View, and every elevation is a Live View and not Plot Lines. plus of course, the usual text and cad details. So, are my Live Views causing the delay in pdf printing? Or my Live elevation views?

No pdf's. I usually convert to png by way of screen shot of pdf as @Joe_Carrick mentioned. I'm anxious to test out the Bachelor View layout to compare.

I will test that out and post the results. thanks for the comparison.

Yes I compared the same plan. I use 144 dpi which is not too high. 68 seconds vs 138 seconds.

Hey all. I’ve been praising my new switch to Windows 11 from macOS with respect to PBR but printing a set of plans to PDF is excruciatingly slow on a pc compared to a Mac. The Mac is at least twice as fast. is there some trick to this? I have used both the Chief pdf print option and the windows pdf option. Am I missing something?

For anyone seeing this in the future who is still contemplating pc vs macOS… The RTX4060 (considered modest) vs the 2023 MacBook Pro with the M3 Pro chip, 36G of ram, here is the result. PBR exterior render 100 samples: RTX = less than 3 seconds. M3 Pro = 110 seconds. At 50 samples I can actually move around in realtime on the PC. 50 Samples gives a very good final image in my opinion. I was led to believe that realtime PBR navigation was not possible on any 4060. The reason for this is that the pc community has a very high bar in what they consider performance.