Barton_Brown

Rob, the quick answer to your question is 'yes' it is possible to change the 'symbol color' by changing the symbol layer in the 'Layer Display Options Dialog' - See Chapter 5 - Layers in the X6 reference manual (starting at page 139) for the specifics. Basically, for what you described you can make new electrical layers, define the color for each new layer, and then assign the symbol to that new layer. The 'go further' answer is that is possible too. It requires you create a new CAD block for the symbol. Probably the easiest way to do this is copy an existing electrical symbol CAD block, modify it, and then in the Symbol dbx assign the new CAD block to it. If you are going to go to this extra work, you will then also want to save this modified symbol to your library to make it easy to use again, either in your existing plan or future plans.

Tom, if you have some specific examples of contrast situations you would like to control, please provide some details. The details will help responders to your question provide more specific answers. Thanks.

Discussion of the Image Properties Panel starts on page 928 in the X6 Reference Manual. Once a Ray Trace has been started, these settings can be modified. The panel includes brightness, contrast, saturation. While the Image Properties Panel allows one to change characteristics of the existing image, it is working with the lighting of the existing image, if the lighting is poor, correcting the image with the Image Properties Panel will be a struggle. On page 926 of the Reference Manual is the discussion of the lighting options in the Ray Trace Options dbx - altering values in the dbx can have a huge impact on the contrast of the ray trace image. Question: are you doing indoor or outdoor ray traces? The values of 'direct sunlight' and 'ambient light' can both effect how much contrast exists in your 'default' image (ie, image not modified by the Images Properties Panel). Obviously, if the image is outdoor, the sun intensity value has a big impact and should be much larger than the 'ambient light' values. If you are doing indoor images, the more lights you have on, the brighter (better contrast) will be your image. Also, the more passes you let the ray trace run, the better will be the image. If you happen to make your walls, ceilings, or floors slightly emissive because you don't have enough lights, then your image contrast will look 'flat' compared to a scene without emissive walls, floors, or ceilings.

I also got a 0 byte plan file (no data) when opening the zip file. Please resend. Thanks.

I upgraded yesterday and still have ray trace progress showing...

Here are the video card stats for the 7770 http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+7770

Doug Park (Chief Architect) referenced GPUs in this thread. https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/1388-does-anyone-still-do-benchmarking/#entry10885

I'm not familiar with AMD processors other than to say that they tend to have slightly lower benchmark scores than equivalent CPU frequency Intel processors. More importantly, I would be very concerned about using a Dual-core processor as CA gets a lot of its performance by utilizing multiple cores in parallel. As I recall, Doug Park of CA has suggested 'the more cores the better' for improved performance. 'Working Well' can be personally subjective depending upon what you are expecting to do. If you want 'instant' CA performance in plan views and renders and do a lot of ray tracing (which is CPU-intensive), then I think you will be disappointed with this computer.

Thanks Gerry, altering the symbol in the library was the step I missed. Obviously, I didn't read Doug's instructions carefully enough - I glanced at them and thought I knew what I was doing. I made the naive assumption that changes made to a symbol while in a plan file would be correctly applied to the symbol. Without Doug's process steps to follow, It is not at all intuitive that, since CA Core libraries are locked, one must first copy the symbol to the user_library, alter its 'mounting' there BEFORE adding to a plan. Or, add the original symbol to a plan, make the change, and (the important step), save the symbol back to the user library and then re-add back to the plan, at which time the modification will take effect. I'm going to submit this as a defect as I suspect I'm not the only one that has been bitten by this behavior... EDIT: defect submitted to tech support.

Gerry, attached is a .plan with only the cable light mounted to a wall and changed to 'floor mount'. I am unable to rotate the symbol about the z axis. What am I missing? cable_lighting.plan

Jenny, If you find this symbol works for you but gets too distorted when stretched, and/or you need more lights, I can make these changes in SketchUp and create a new symbol, or, you could just use multiple copies of the existing symbol linked along the beam. Just a thought...

Hi Jenny, I also tried Doug's list of actions and was unsuccessful in getting the cable lights to work as desired. Specifically, even though it was 'floor mounted' I could not get it to rotate. The funny thing is that other CA wall mount lights also had this issue when placed in a plan and then changed from wall mount to floor mount. I'm not sure what is going on - could still be user error on my part, but I think it is a CA issue having to do with a symbol starting out as a wall mount symbol and then changing it to floor mount. Why do I say this? Because I exported the cable light as a .3ds symbol (which required at least one wall be present for the light to show in CA which is a clue that CA still thinks it is a wall mount symbol). Anyway, once imported into SketchUp 8, I exploded the component, deleted the wall elements and saved the cable light only elements as a SketchUp 8 file. I was then able to import this symbol back into CA as a 'floor mounted' light which I can rotate in plan view around the Z axis and from the symbol dbx can rotate about the Y axis. Also, I can stretch the symbol by changing the 'width' in the object dbx. I didn't mess with the actual light data. It has one default light right now. If you stretch the lights, you will need to add lights and manually configure the physical location if you want them to show correctly in a render or ray trace. Anyway, attached is my version of the CA cable light which might work better for you... Since it is a library object, it is a .calibz file. Download and double-click on it and it should be placed in your user library (where you can delete it if it doesn't meet your needs). CA cable light.calibz

Jenny, To get the light symbol to be other than 90 degree (perpendicular) to the wall, I believe you need to change the Z axis rotation (be sure to hit the 'rotation' button for it to take effect). Also, in the 2D block, you will probably want to generate a new 2D block showing the rotation. The x and y rotations should allow the lighting to follow the beam to the center (assuming the beam is not horizontal). As Gerry said, this will take a lot of fiddling...

I'm confused... The line styles are stored in the library. The 'standard' line styles are part of the CA core library which is a 'locked' library and items in the library can not be deleted. That said, any USER CREATED line style is stored in the 'user library' which is unlocked and any line style there can be edited/modified or removed from the library. Now, if a line style is 'actively used' in a plan, I can understand where it can not be deleted, just like you can not remove 'active' materials from a plan. However, it would seem that if you knew where the particular user defined line was used, it could be selected and a new line style applied. At that point, the 'old' user line style could be deleted since it is no longer used/active. It seems like one should always be able to modify/edit/remove user defined line types. What am I missing?

If you made your drive and walkway out of polyline slabs, it probably shows up in 'Exterior Trim' as Mick stated above. OTOH, f you made your 'Drive' out of a 'road' and your 'walkway' out of a 'sidewalk', I don't think it will show up at all in a material list, at least I can not find either the roadway or sidewalks in the material list for a large parking lot and entrance drive for a commercial remodel I worked on recently. While these layers are marked with an 'M' in the layers list, I don't believe CA calculates these for the material list, just like it doesn't calculate terrain volume. Of course, road and sidewalk areas and volumes can be found by opening the road or sidewalk object dbx and clicking on the polyline tab.

Les, I understand the problem you describe and can easily replicate it. As you have probably already determined, the problem seems to be with how CA deals with molded polylines (which I think is how they create their window casings). Anyway, you can also duplicate the issue you have by drawing a square 3D molded polyline in elevation view. Applying a brick material to the molded polyline displays similarly to the window casing in 'standard' and vector views. Because of this, I think you may be stuck with using something like a polyline slab to create the horizontal and vertical casing segments. With these you can control the direction of the 'pattern' in the material dbx edit section. As you are probably already aware, you could convert the polyline slabs into one library symbol which would reduce the tediousness of applying it to all the windows. Sorry I'm not much help other than to reinforce the idea that the problem seems to be how CA deals with the pattern file when applied to molded polylines. oh, and if you haven't already submitted a defect ticket to Tech Support, this issue certainly qualifies...

Is your hardware a MAC or a PC? In a recent thread, dshall noted that he gets very large pdf files on a MAC (~85 MB) but small pdf files (~4 MB) on a PC. The issue is the MAC pdf printer driver - this is an Apple SW issue, not something the CA can correct. If your hardware is a MAC, you might look for a different 'pdf printer driver' rather than the standard one. On the PC, there is a nice one called pdf995. It doesn't appear to run on the MAC but there might be something similar. Once installed, it just looks like a printer which you select and it creates the pdf file.

For now, CA does seem to rebuild the 3D model a number of times, as has been noted. I believe KT is correct about the impact the CPU technology will have on the rebuild time - your CPU has 2 cores and no advanced technologies (Intel's term) such as Turbo Boost or hyper-threading. OTOH, I too have seen multiple 3D model rebuilds but they take on the order of less than five seconds. My PC CPU has 6 cores with hyper-threading (effectively 12 cores). With almost twice the CPU frequency and a factor of 6 more cores, the rebuild time of 5 seconds vs. 70 seconds scales pretty closely.

Until one of the CA power users is able to comment, I'll offer up one possibility, which in essence you already suggested. It is somewhat of a kludge so you wouldn't want to do this until the house design is 'finished', at least the roof portion. 1) Take elevation views of areas with issues and create polyline solids by tracing over the existing facias. 2) rebuild roof with but turn off the 'facia' in the structure dbx. 3) hopefully the polyline solids will now be correctly located (may have to do some adjustment in plan view). 4) cut off or miter the offending ends of the polyline solids by adding or adjusting polyline solid segments, as you suggested for 'real life' One thought - from the image I have been assuming that this is a two story house with the second story being being set back from the first floor. I bring this up because on page 69 of the users guide of X6, they discuss building a 'gull wing' roof, which is what this would look like without the 'dormer'. For the 'gull wing' roof, CA correctly builds the facia. I'm not a roof building expert but there might be some tips in how the 'gull wing' roof is built that could apply to your situation.

Thanks Scott. Do you know if the "PDF printer" is part of CA or part of the MAC OS/drivers? Seems strange that if it were under control of CA that they wouldn't produce identical results. Not being a MAC user, I'm assuming the 'mac over PC' is not driven by CA MAC functionality v. CA PC functionality (which I assume should be essentially identical) but is the 'MAC v. PC' theological discussion... Thanks.

Scott, you've got me curious now. Is your complaint documented elsewhere? If so, how might I find it (URL, search topic, etc)? If not, and at the risk of hijacking this thread, would you elaborate, or start a new thread? Thanks!

Jeanette, Check out CA training tutorials on remodeling (starts at #358) - select the 'remodeling' topic in the 'select a video series' selection area. I think most of your questions will be answered in these videos. #363 addresses your specific questions regarding using layers, I think.

I too use SketchUp (Version 8) for creating custom 3D content for use in CA. Unlike Robert, I just import the .skp Sketchup file into CA. When I need to export a model from CA to Sketchup, I have used both .dwg and .3ds formats, both seem to work fine.

Ivan, would you be willing to share the name of the 3rd party software? Thanks.

Sherry, thank you for the insights and how you use guidelines. FWIW, after watching a few more CA training videos where the multiple copy tool was used, and now being alert to the possible uses of the multiple copy tool, I have become a fan of it as an alternative to an 'offset' tool.