Michael_Gia

Here is about 12 seconds in Gemini. Standard render in Chief vs Gemini enhanced render. This is my prompt: "Increase photorealism of this image. Improve lighting, global illumination, reflections, shadows, and material texture resolution. Preserve the exact architecture, materials, proportions, windows, doors, and camera perspective. Do not modify the design in any way—only enhance realism and render quality."

Apple will not help you here even if you waited for the M50000000000 Pro Max Super Ultra. If you want quicker and better pbr from a Mac then just incorporate AI into your workflow to achieve that. AI in 20 seconds will improve the quality of your renderings way more than out of the box Chief pbr. Or get a pc. I would rather stay with MacOs personally.

I’m talking from the perspective of sharing and/or collaborating. Like it or not it’s an autocad world. And even when I tell those same acad jockeys to simply import my pdf construction documents and scale them they either don’t know how, are too lazy or as a policy feel this is over reaching. Which I can’t blame them for.

dimensions also come out really screwy from Chief into AutoCAD. I’m really considering the workflow of designing the home with my clients in Chief, but once the 3-D model is complete, I export the plans, elevations and sections into AutoCAD to do my construction documents. I’ll collaborate easier with the engineers and other architects. It might be a little more work but I’ll have universally accepted plans with proper annotations and dimensions.

When I order trusses or floor systems I usually send a pdf of the plans generated in Chief. I want to change that and instead send an AutoCAD layout file instead of a PDF. This is to avoid errors of miscommunications when for example a dimension is missing etc. If they have the AutoCAD file then they can measure whatever they want. Anyone else do this?

Delete that 4” slab in the “floor structure”

Are there any sneak peek videos out there yet? Is it too much to ask? Or at least a chocolate easter bunny?

There is no easy or Royal road to learning this software. Good news is, it’s very user friendly and this forum is responsive. Learn “saved plan views” and how layer sets/default sets work etc. Don’t use someone else’s template etc. If you don’t know how to set up that template yourself you will run into more frustration than it’s worth when things go wrong. Make your own typical plan and layout file and use the “save as” method.

@johnny Really nice work! great colour scheme and font. May I ask what font that is? How was that rendering done?

Apparently, the M5 max has hardware accelerated raytracing. That's a first for Apple, I think?

Have you tested PBR capabilities on both machines? That would be the only benchmark I would be interested in. That is how fast can each machine perform 100 samples of the same PBR view?

Not sure if this helps, but I took a page out of Revit’s hotkey philosophy. That is I mostly use a two letter system. You’ll instantly get more combinations and it’s a lot easier to string together 2 keys that make sense. examples: m,r for material region t,m tape measure d,e end to end dimension d,a angle dimension d,m manual dimension it’s endless.

The roof above the garage is just a room with the ceiling height set to the height you want your parapet walls. Add a cap on those walls, your floor finish is EPDM and you can even use the automatically generated baseboards as the flashing by adjusting their heights and material. You can use the same principle for your balcony on the right and just set your walls to the railing type you’re looking for. What René said for the canapé roof over the door on the left, or just cheat with 3D solids. (If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying) Of course, use proper detail drawings to illustrate these features and not some 3D generated section. My opinion of course.

Situations like the one below are a problem in Chief. Sometimes they will disconnect randomly or move and resnap arbitrarily. Dimensions will un-attach randomly no matter how many times you reconnect them etc... I usually "solve" this by creating a thinner version of the wall which seems to work most of the time, but Chief still behaves weirdly around small offsets. What do you guys do?

It's the door opening indicators that are really missing to achieve this look.

To use Chief terms, the Elevation marker on the right measuring the Floor at -118 1/8" always measures to what you have as "Floor Structure" which can be set in the floor defaults or on a room by room basis. Don't think, concrete or any other material, because your floor structure may contain more than one material depending on your plan. Up here in the great white north, my basement Floor Structure has, 2 inches styrofoam, polyethylene, and 4 inches of concrete (total 6"). This way it shows up and calculates proper heights according to code up here.

The same stuff that didn't work properly in X13 still doesn't work properly in X17. Lots of neat new features but with even more bugs. Visually better though.

you know you're a redneck, when your detail plans have a gun rack... (sorry, couldn't help myself)

X17 is the buggiest version in a long while. I really hope they fix all the crap under the hood in the next iteration.

I see what you did there...

beautiful! You got it to improve the lighting, landscape, perspective all while preserving your structure and design elements. well done, human.

This is worth a 10 minute look…

@ComputerMaster86 I think the key is that you have to give AI a lot less to do if you don’t want those AI “hallucinations” as some people call them. In my example, I started off with a decent pbr from Chief with the actual materials I wanted and as good as I could get the lighting and perspective. ChatGPT did a good job because it didn’t have to invent too much. When it does I will usually reply with “pretty good but change even less from the original image” I rarely have to use this, so I do think ChatGPT is learning.

@JBi-PDX Ctrl Tab Shift Ctrl Tab (backward)

@Chrisb222Nice, I also get decent results with ChatGPT but would like some kind of built-in AI. Not like SoftPlan. I'm sure Chief can come up with an intelligent solution. Here is my Chat GPT workflow. I upload a PBR render. My prompt is: "improve the lighting and landscaping and material quality but do not change the materials or architecture." Chief PBR ChatGPT: