Barton_Brown

Interesting article. Thanks for posting.

I believe that Chief, especially X9 is no longer single threaded when developing plans and standard camera views. I recall reading a statement to this effect a number of years ago here on the forum but can not locate the thread at this time. For what it is worth, a quick demonstration confirms, at least to me, that Chief is multi-threaded in plan preparation. I use a windows gadget (CPU Usage) that displays the % usage of each CPU core/thread. Just the act of opening an inactive camera will cause all the threads to bump to 100% until the view is displayed.

I can not access ChiefTalk when I am connected to the internet through a VPN (Witopia). I did not have this issue with the old forum. Obviously, I can connect when I turn off the VPN feature.

Joe, FWIW, the architect on Bonaire (used to be Netherlands Antilles, now part of the Netherlands) that I sometimes provide rendering services to dimensions everything in mm with no separators and no units indicator (mm is assumed). Don't know if this is standard practice for all architects on Bonaire but it appears to be acceptable for the local plan permit office. ie 1 10 100 1000 10000

It has been quite a while since I watched the training videos and read the documentation so I may be repeating what you already know... If you prefer to not be making multiple copies of your plan and deleting portions of it, another approach which I believe is still valid and produces similar results is to use the layer sets to selectively hide portions of the plan or items in the plan. When doing this in the past, I typically used the approach to turn off things like fixtures, furniture, or items with high face counts that would not be displayed. In one case I had a porch that wrapped almost completely around the second floor of the house. the porch railings had detailed balusters (high face count) so I created multiple layers for the railings/balusters. In the desired 'camera view' set I could then easily turn these items on/off to improve ray trace performance. I found this approach less confusing than keeping track of multiple partial plans, especially if the design wasn't finalized (is it ever?).

Sliders move in 10% increments for me as well. Finer tuning can be done by typing the desired number into the dbx.

Alan, The water material has transparent properties. It is intended to be used in features like swimming pools where the pool bottom, etc is visible. I suspect that to use it successfully as you are intending, you will have to provide bottom materials for the lakes and the stream bed... Just a guess...

Bryce, just to reiterate, as I mentioned last year when this thread started, there was a huge performance difference between OneDrive and Dropbox - with Dropbox being significantly faster. I don't know about the performance of Google Drive. It all depends upon whether Google does 'intelligent' syncing where only the changed parts of a file are updated and not the whole file. OneDrive would update the whole file which was a killer on a library database. I'm not much help here on answering your question other than to confirm that it is likely that one approach is faster than another... If you start using Google Drive and find that it is taking minutes for the syncing to complete and this time is getting in your way from a workflow standpoint, I would suggest getting a free Dropbox account and 'give it a go'. Obvously, if you find the syncing time to be insignificant with Google Drive, no need to change...

Mike, I left the core, manufacture, and bonus library files alone (did not move them to drop box). I only moved the 'Chief Architect Premier X7 Data' folder to Dropbox. This is working fine for me. I didn't want to muck around with the CA core libraries and since it wasn't a big deal to keep them upgraded on each machine I left them alone. For me, it is the user library that changed a lot and I wanted to have an easy way to keep my desktop and laptops in sync.

I agree with Joe on considering a desktop PC for your van. You can easily get two high-end, overclocked desktops for half the price of the laptop you quoted, and I suspect with much superior performance.

Regarding Rapid mode, I disabled this feature after reading the following article: http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dram-caching-on-the-samsung-840-evo-ssd/8 (this is the conclusion page). Granted, this article is a year old now and Samsung may have improved the performance of Rapid mode. The conclusion of the article is: "Although I wouldn't recommend that folks enable RAPID mode as it exists right now, I am encouraged to see Samsung exploring new ways to speed up its SSDs. RAPID mode definitely has the potential to become more appealing as it matures, and it won't be restricted to the 840 EVO for long."

Thanks!

Jintu, would it be giving away too much of your technical advantage to tell us what rendering SW you used? If you chose to remain silent on this, I fully understand! Thanks. (I took a short tour around your website - very impressive - gives me something to aspire towards! )

Scott, unless I missed it somewhere, you have not stated what internet speed your plan is supposed to provide. Are you paying for a higher rate than 7.5 mb/sec? if not, 'nuf said...

Uhm... the limited warranty on my 840 EVO is 3 years. Also, before I turned on the Rapid mode, the little 'help' description stated that it actually improves longevity - this would make sense in that a lot of the reads/writes might never make it to the SSD as they likely stay in the DRAM memory cache (the Samsung Magician looks like it allocated 4 GB RAM on my system). Anyway, I'm nit-picking - thanks again for pointing out this feature!

Thanks for the 'heads up' on rapid mode. I just installed the 500 GB 840 EVO on my system last week and was unaware of 'rapid mode'. It made a huge difference in performance - as reported by the 'Samsung Magician' application (and I was happy with the performance prior to knowing about Rapid Mode )

I think you will continue to get the 'light flares' as long as photons are on. That said, it you add sufficient additional lighting to the scene, it will do a good job of swamping out the flares. By additional lighting I mean actual lights, not just increasing the ambient light settings.

Scott, This is one of those $100 nuggets (maybe more) for me that you recently talked about. Thank you for pointing out this feature! Our Bonaire house is a work-in-progress so I'm regularly looking at the plans to decide where planters might best fit, or whatever. Of course, the plans needed to be metric but I'm too old to be really fluent in metric and tend to need to convert everything back to imperial before my mind really visualizes the distances. A few mouse clicks in the dimension defaults dbx and now my CDs show both!! A major +1 for you on this.

Yes CA takes advantage of more than 4 cores. I have a 6 core Intel processor and utilize a Windows gadget that shows CPU usage. For ray tracing, all six cores get fully loaded (when the CA 'optimized for ray trace' option is set). When doing something within CA that loads the system all CPUs also become active. I don't have any direct experience with AMD processors but would expect all cores would also be utilized.

Rod, If you can wait a little longer, you might want to wait for Gen 6 (Skylake). http://www.pcworld.com/article/2683392/pc-confusion-to-linger-on-intels-quick-jump-to-skylake.html

Bryce, you may have seen it on TV as there was a short news segment as well as a local newspaper article. My uncle and brother both liked the jump. The only part that somewhat worried my brother was the flight up to 10,000 feet (I think). The plane was jam-packed with people - 10 other jumpers besides the two tandems. I recall he mentioned he was concerned about having a safe exit if there was a problem with the aircraft. I found this sort of amusing coming from a guy with a commercial pilots license, flies a private plane, is building a kit plane, and who flew for four years as a navigator in an F-4 Phantom in the early '70s.

Hi Scott, Yes, I am saying that having 'photons on' causes the flare problem. I believe that with 'photons on' the ray trace engine is looking for 'bounced photons of light' as well as direct reflections. While the 'photons on' setting creates a more realistic lighting effect, it also has this annoying flare artifact. Maybe X7 will eliminate it...

Scott, do you typically ray trace with the photons option ON or OFF? The 'roof' solution typically doesn't have much effect on reducing the flares for me, but turning off 'photons' does.

It was my uncle's first jump - so was a tandem. My brother also did his first tandem jump with our uncle. This was a 'big deal' for the sky diving company, as one might suspect, especially after someone leaked to the local newspaper that a 100 year old was jumping. The company owner did the honors for my uncle. Both he and my brother's partner were excellent. Landed so softly that they both did it standing up. My brother said the impact was about equivalent to stepping off a 1 foot high wall.

Since this thread is already off-topic... My uncle lives in Arroyo Grande and has for fifty years. Last July he celebrated his 100th birthday by going skydiving.