Barton_Brown

Not sure what OS and web browser you are using but for me in Windows 8.1, both IE and Google Chrome web browsers are quick to alert me when I do 'creative' spelling on this forum...

FYI, the Intel Core i5-2450m @ 2.5 ghz is DUAL core, 4 threads. So, a couple of debugging thoughts that you might consider... 1) Compare the 'rebuild' on different plans - is it just this plan or is it consistently occurring on all plans. Could just be a CA plan issue, not your laptop if it happens on only the one plan. 2) if you determine it is not the plan, you could post the plan and ask others to run a test on the plan to see if or how long the rebuild takes. This might give you a handle on the 'horsepower' of your laptop compared to other machines. For example, I have a couple year old laptop with a Core i7-2670QM (quad core, 8 thread) 2.2 GHz that works well.

Bon tardes Jon, I'm not anti-SharePoint at all - as I mentioned earlier I used to be a mini-evangelist for it within the 'large organization' environment where I worked. I highlighted your comment above where I agree that it would/does definitely shine. Your link also helped highlight present OOB functionality. Regarding research: it is ongoing, and that includes asking evangelists why they prefer the solution they are evangelizing. If I were more than a part-time, one-man-band, I would seriously consider a SharePoint solution. Hopefully this discussion will get the thought wheels turning for others that do have significant collaboration needs. Thank you for taking the time to share. [off topic] Have you been to Bonaire recently? Significant change has occurred over the last 20 years, as with every place. We now do the snow-bird thing - spend the Fall/Winter/part of Spring on Bonaire and the Spring/Summer in Oregon. Works for us!

Hi Jon, From your posts, you are clearly a SharePoint advocate. I'm struggling to see how a generic SharePoint solution will help. Let's assume that I decided to get an Office365/OneDrive/Sharepoint subscription, then what? OOTB, I think that SharePoint doesn't really do much except provide a collaborative web front-end with maybe the ability to create workflows (see my reference above to the aeccloud blog post) - This is based on my admittedly dated familiarity with SharePoint. If you are using a SharePoint solution, please elaborate/enlighten me about how it is helping you. What are the issues that a SP solution solves and how much effort is required to create this solution? One limitation I have found, at least from my perspective is the OneDrive storage. I used OneDrive for a while as my 'file store/sync source' for CA plans between computers but found the sync latency to be long, especially for large files such as the User_Library.calib because OneDrive is a 'dumb sync' and pushes an entire file when a change occurs. I switched to Dropbox because of its 'smart sync' where only the changed portions of a large file are pushed over the internet. Dropbox provided a huge performance improvement. Thank you for any insights you have time to provide.

The conclusion I am about to write will seem obvious to most, but I was curious about the present state of DVCS (distributed version control systems) and who knows, I might want to write some code again... I'm posting this mostly for completeness in case someone else was curious. I spent some time today exploring bitbucket.org, getting an account, installing git, and running through the basic tutorial. If I were a software developer or web developer, this looks like a great solution (especially the cost of 'free' for 5 or less collaborators). However, in the FAQ section, I found this: Have a lot of binaries such as images or sounds? Keep in mind Bitbucket is a code hosting service not a file sharing service. If a lot of your files are extremely large or if your files are binaries or executables, you should understand Git or Mercurial will not work well with them. You'll find that even locally your repository is barely usable. Moreover, Bitbucket can't display diffs on binaries. For binary or executable storage, we recommend you look into file hosting services such as DropBox, rsync, rsnapshot, rdiff-backup, and so forth. Still not sure what to do? Review this post on stackoverflow for more ideas. In other places they said small binaries are OK but obviously, the real purpose of bitbucket/git is version control of code. The only purpose of putting binaries, such as a .plan file into the system would be to document each version of the plan. At this point, I'm feeling that the extra overhead of checkout/committing seems much greater than just making a date-stamped version of a plan file (like CA does for archive files) when necessary, write a small text file noting the state of the plan/layout file and storing everything in Dropbox. This doesn't solve the sharing/file locking issue for multi-user offices, but will work well for me since this has been my approach all along (except for the recent addition of Dropbox as a store/sync service).

Kirk, Thank you. Hardcore I see

Thanks Kirk, exactly the response I was hoping to read. A couple of additional questions: 1) what git server do you use (a cloud service or did you set up your own server)? 2) what GUI (if any) do you prefer? Thank you!

Jon, thanks for the pointer to AEC SharePoint possibilities. I am generally familiar with SharePoint. In my previous work life as a engineering manager at a Fortune 20 electronics company, one of my avocations was evangelizing about how SharePoint could help us with program management. This was in the early days of SharePoint (around the time Gig-werks was formed). I went so far as to set up my own servers, install SharePoint, and create some program sites. About six-months later corporate IT shut me down because they were creating their own SharePoint farm for the corporation - good for them. In my Google search I found the following blog entry: http://aeccloud.com/sharepoint-clearly-the-answer-to-everything-sort-of/ where he did an excellent job describing what SharePoint is and is not. It was a good refresher read for me and was good background as I investigated what appears to the be the leader in AEC SharePoint solutions - the Gig-werks company you referenced. A large portion of the Gig-werks solution would apply to a lot of different industries - appeared to be a good project/program management tool. However, what caught my attention was the statement made in one of the YouTube presentations that their target audience was 100 seats to 3,000 seats. Their solution included some LOB (line of business) solutions provided by ISVs (independent software vendors) that would seem to require a fairly large capital investment in software, and that could only be recovered by a lot of users - and thus only affordable by a large AEC company. I would love to play with their solution but it looked like overkill for small shops and completely out of the question for 1 person shops. The Gig-Werks solution looked wonderful but I'm not looking for a complete program management workflow solution, I'm mostly interested in just the file management aspect that can be provided by an SCM, if it is inexpensive and 'light weight'. While I'm looking, I guess I'll continue to rely on copied files and Dropbox...

Recently, Todd (4hotshoez) posted a question about file management on a network. Doug Park responded with pointers to two tools, one was git. After spending yesterday afternoon exploring Git, I am wondering if there is anyone using this tool for CA file management? While the primary target audience of Git is software development teams, it appears it could be used for CA team development projects (or even for individual users wanting better control of their development process). What I am curious about is whether using this type of tool falls into the 'misapplication of tool' category or just that one would be using a small subset of the designed capabilities since CA projects don't tend to easily fit into code branching and merging scenarios :-).

But... from the help file: Rounding Method - Specify how the sections of dimension lines that locate more than two objects are rounded. • Grid Rounding ensures that the sum of the parts of a dimension line add up to the whole distance. To produce this result, some sections may not be rounded accurately. This is the recommended rounding method and is selected by default. • Distance Rounding addresses each section of a dimension line individually, which could result in the sum of these sections not being equal to the whole. This option is selected by default for files created in Version 8 or prior but is not recommended for newer files. See Compatibility With Previous Versions. I could easily be misunderstanding the issue presented by the OP, but I don't think the rounding method in the dimensions dbx applies to the issue...

Glenn, thank you.

Jintu, thank you for the suggestions/tips. Attached is ray trace where the only change from the previous was the change from 'environment light' of white to 'environment light' of 'sky'. It definitely removed the slight 'yellow' tinge in the whole image of the previous ray trace. The 'sky' is especially noticeable on the side pillars of the hearse which changed from 'slight yellow' to 'slight blue'. This change did make the image colors more realistic in my view. Regarding saturation, the colors look good on my monitor - any more saturated would appear to be too much IMHO - maybe it is just my monitors... What does High Resolution Doppler Imaging (HRDI) have to do with this? Just kidding , pretty sure you meant HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging). Not a topic I'm very familiar with - yet another topic to explore! Regarding night lighting: while I agree that everyone in the world seems to like the softwhite/yellowish light, both my wife and I are apparently at the age where we find it hard to see in the yellow light and much prefer the bluish/daylight lighting. If I was doing this commercially, I'd probably adjust to 'the norm' and yellow out the night lighting... Thanks again.

I'm glad you asked the question - something I too have wondered - what is the consensus of 'best practice' performed by others on this topic? I have violated this 'best practice' a couple of times and regretted it later.

Congratulations to Scott, and thank you for the pre-meeting critique and suggestions this morning. For completeness, here is what I learned: 1) the obvious: it is all about composition. Reduce the amount of driveway in the foreground, add some 'tree shadows' to soften the look. 2) night views: stop using 'photons', this is where the bleed comes from. It makes the lighting a little harsher, but removes the annoying bleed artifacts. See the attachment below. 3) For day views: I can live with the bleed, especially on outdoor shots, because using photons makes the scenes more 'realistic', for me, from a lighting perspective. Shadows are not as harsh and more ambient light gets included. Attached below are two daytime views, one without photons, one with photons. The chrome on the vehicles is much more realistic using photons. And yes, photons increases the time of a ray trace - good excuse to purchase a more powerful PC. For those that are curious, the light settings are encoded in the file name (hover the cursor over a thumbnail to see file name): after the date comes 1) ambient occlusion 2) sun intensity 3) environment light 4) either 'no photons' or blank, which means photons on (my default)

Unlike Scott, I will not attempt to sway the judge's decision (and thanks!).

Just to be 'in the running' with Jintu means a lot to me. For years I have admired the work he has posted on Chief Talk. Joe, thanks for the tip/suggestion. The light sources are CA. I tried turning off the recessed spots in the vaulted area and initially thought this would be a good way to track down the offending lights because the gable and roof bleeds were gone. BUT, as the number of passes increased, these bleeds crept back in to the point of there being no real difference between images. This is like trying to solve a complicated puzzle - eventually I run out of enthusiasm and interest...

Michael, Lumion looks like a great tool, too bad it is so expensive.

Thanks Doug!

Greg: thanks! Sherry and Michael: regarding the vehicle size - I didn't realize that they were too big on the first set of ray traces that I did, although something didn't seem correct, just kind of an odd feeling. It wasn't until I moved one of them to put it in a parking space that I realized the problem (it was way too big to fit). Anyway, I did a little research on the dimension specs for a 'hearse' and scaled down the vehicles. Changing the size is easy. Open the 'object' dbx, not the symbol dbx, click the 'retain aspect ratio' and make the necessary changes. I also changed the material properties of the vehicles, changing white to 'chrome' and making the body panels reflective to represent a nicely waxed hearse... The people are 3D people from the SketchUp 3D warehouse, the small plants are 3D plants from the CA library. I'm disappointed at the amount of 'light bleed' that occurred in the night scene - it went 20 passes (about 2 hours).

Done for now.

OK Doug, stop teasing, what are the two source control systems?!

Thanks Scott. Glad you initiated this challenge - it is fun trying out different approaches.

OK, here are my three amateur attempts... I'm partial to the second one - head-on with the Caddy.

Uhm, one problem, if we are going to use Michael's textures, there are a bunch missing from the plan file.

Michael C - If you want a realistic rendering that 'pops', I think you will need to go to ray tracing. For me, there is a huge difference with ray tracing always looking better than a render. Fortunately, ray traces in CA are now pretty quick for decent image quality, especially with external images. I also agree that the shadows need to be darker (more contrast). Part of my issue with your rendering is that while the house has shadows, none of the landscaping does, which makes the image 'flat'. This of course, is corrected with ray traces. Of course, for the most 'pop' and realism, the plants need to be 3D. One final observation: it appears all the vehicles are floating a couple of inches off the driveway - small items like this can have a big impact on image realism. Also, I agree with Gene, sometimes clients focus too much on the details of a 'photo realistic' image. Fortunately, once you understand the client, CA provides tools to provide images that work for you and them.