rispgiu

I looked at several tutorials but none that I could find explained on how to get a similar result to the attached image. 

I was able to create the plot and display the polyline of the house but I am trying to display the "outline" of the walls and some other additional details visible in this image, driveway, concrete and some annotations. 

Any suggestions? 

21 hours ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

 That's because the material properties where set for PBR. To get a bit of sheen I had to crank up the reflectivity (reduce roughness). Now when I Ray Trace the sheen is too glossy, will need to reduce it. That's a big issue as material properties are not seen the same way between PBR and Ray Tracing.

The fact that we need to set up material properties differently between PBR and RT is really annoying. 

15 hours ago, VinnieVicon said:

You can go to 2015 IRC code book and it will tell you there. Unless this is something very unusual,  the building official doesn't like to be bothered with questions that are in the code books.

 

 

Vinnie 

Thank you Vinnie. 

Just to keep everyone updated:

I have drafted the first duplex, not finished yet but enough for the developer to present a concept. It was actually fairly simple after all of the great suggestions you guys have provided. 

By using the "marriage wall" that Mick suggested that simplified a whole lot of things (foundation, roof and framing)

Thank you all so very much. 

On 3/12/2018 at 5:31 PM, Chrisb222 said:

 

You're welcome!

 

Before Chief, when I drew plans on paper, or later, a 2D CAD program, I always worked in 1/2" increments for framing, and 1" increments for foundations.

 

As Joe indicated, with studs at 3-1/2" and 5-1/2", minimum of half-inch is necessary for framing.

 

My plans don't get into dimensioning things like drywall, but on rare occasions there will be something that does have to dimension to a smaller than 1/2" fraction, but it's the rare exception. Post spacing for 5-1/2" posts is the most common place I encounter this, since they're 2-3/4" to center.

 

If designing a block foundation (don't often encounter those now), I tried to work in 8" increments when possible, for efficiency of block-laying.

But I'm not an architect, I'm a builder who also designs, so I'm thinking of keeping things simple on the jobsite. Plus I just think a plan looks cleaner with only whole or half-inch measurements.

 

When I work in Chief, my dimension defaults are always set to "Grid Rounding". That way if all my dimensions read how I want them to (whole or half-inch), I know the sum of all dimensions in a string will match an overall dimension even if some dimensions are not really in 1/2" increments (see example).

 

I've never had any "surprises" due to this approach.

 

 

Thank you Chris, I guess I've gone through my allowed votes for today but I'll make sure you get one tomorrow  

3 hours ago, Alaskan_Son said:

We have been involved in the construction of MANY duplexes and here's how we've typically handled that area.  I just copied Ray's CAD block and modified it a bit...

PARTY WALL EXAMPLE.calibz

 

Thank you very much for sharing this. 

5 hours ago, para-CAD said:

Every party wall I ever framed was (2) separate walls. 

Some had fire-rated GWB in the 2" gap space plus sound batting 4x8 sheets.

 

I have a sketch at the point in time in this video

 

Thank you this is great. 

I am always blown away by the support, encouragement and information received by this community .

You guys are the best and in my opinion you make CA worth more than what it costs. 

Thank you all sooooo much.   

Thank you all, this is truly very helpful. 

Thank you Eric, thats a great idea. 

I am drafting a few duplexes, I've never done one nor actually built one so I was wondering if the interior walls dividing the two units need to be 6" each, or just build a main wall in the middle of the two units at 10"-12".

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

1 minute ago, Joe_Carrick said:

I typically try to work at 1/2" increments but dimension to the nearest 1/8".

 

Sometimes you just have to make adjustments for framing and wall layer thicknesses.  Studs are 3-1/2" and 5-1/2" so depending on which side of a wall you are dimensioning to there will be a 1/2" variation and if you are dimensioning to the center line of a wall that gets down to 1/4".  Assuming you want that wall to be continuous across the building you just have to make some adjustments.  Then if there's a difference in finish materials (1/2" drywall vs 5/8" drywall) the dimensions can be 1/8" variance to get the alignment desired.

 

I don't think there's an easy answer to the question.  It just depends on the job conditions.  Carpenters are quite capable of layout to 1/8" increments.

Thank you Joe for your answer. 

9 hours ago, Chrisb222 said:

Personally, I use 1/2" as the smallest fraction on plans.

Thank you Chris, I had actually tried what you have suggested and it worked. I then wondered if at the end of the build I would find any surprises

21 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

My guess would be your Dims. are not set to Use 1/16th currently OR your Snap Grid is not set to 1/16th too , thus allowing you to Draw to that same Accuracy in the 1st Place.

 

For the Existing Drawing you could try Rounding the Dims differently eg to 1/4" to see if the 1/16th Fractions disappear.

 

Lew's Suggestion Post covers most of it from another thread Last month.

 

 

M.

 

 

Thank you Mick, I'll give it a try. 

23 hours ago, lbuttery said:

see this suggestion for methods of having fractions display or not

 

I prefer to have them not display most of the time

 

I try to model to 1/16 for as-builts - for new construction aim for 1"

 

when printing the final layout I display only to the nearest 1"

unless it is a "critical" area like cabinets or some other tight requirement

 

 

 

Lew

Thank you Lew, I appreciate it. 

Is there a suggested smaller fraction to layout a floor plan that you guys would recommend?

 I am trying to avoid the need of going through the plans and fix all of the 1/16 etc. 

Thank you in advance

20 minutes ago, Electromen said:

My MacPro has dual AMD D500 video cards with 3GB of VRAM on each one.

CA only recognizes one card.  It would be nice to take advantage of both cards.

I believe CA is not the only one. 

When the iMac pro came out it was tested against the MacPro and found that its video card performed better than the dual video card, mostly because the 2nd video card wouldn't kick in for several tests. 

15 minutes ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

 

They all had the sun on. I just tried it and it seems to be equivalent to one light source, so nothing to be concerned about.

That’s good to know.

I was wondering if more intensity equaled more usage but it sounds that is not the case.

23 minutes ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

Concerning the computer performance issues I have been having. Done some further testing and monitoring and this is what's happening.

 

My GTX 745 has 4GB of RAM and my system has 8 GB of Ram. When I run a PBR each scene takes up approximately 2GB of my video cards memory. Once I reach 3 scenes the video cards dedicated memory limit has been exceeded, it then starts using shared memory. As I only have 8GB of system memory there is not really much of it free to share with the video card. As such the system starts using the virtual memory page file on the hard disk. My main hard drive is just a standard drive so once it starts using this the necessary file swapping is slow.

 

What I did. I have a 32GB IBM Optane card so I changed the virtual memory page file to it and sized it to 16GB. As the Optane drive is really fast the slowness resulting from the file swapping has been reduced to the point that it is not really noticeable. This has significantly improved performance across the board, flipping through windowed tabs, activating DBX's in PBR windows and PBR regeneration.

 

Though my GPU is still being maxed out during PBR generation, it's not as bad as before.

 

I also tested RAM consumption in respect to the number of active lights.

 

0 lights - 0.5 GB

10 lights - 0.9 GB

20 lights - 1.1 GB

30 lights - 1.3 GB

40 lights - 1.6 GB

50 lights - 1.9 GB

 

There seems to be a fairly linear increase in RAM consumption in respect to the number of active lights. As can be seen, with no active lights RAM consumption is only 0.5GB and the PBR generation time is almost instant. At 50 lights the consumed RAM is now 1.9 GB and my PBR generation time has increased to about 12 seconds.

 

Just a special thanks to Mick for his input on this subject 

 

What about the sun? How did that impact your system? Were you able to test it?

1 hour ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

Here is my experience with PBR on my first real project.

 

This is an existing home that required modeling and the generation of a conceptual main floor. Everything is CA including all objects and materials. All scenes are generated using the new PBR camera feature.

 

Here are the resulting scenes.

 

Work Flow

Working with multiple PBR camera view windows was extremely frustrating and very time consuming. The main issue here is that every time a window is activated the PBR regeneration occurs and this results in a 15-20 second delay each and every time. Also, when making any changes in an active PBR window it automatically forces a regeneration, another 15-20 second delay. The big problem is that this PBR regeneration is initiated for each and every change, there is no way that I know of to perform multiple changes and then manually initiate the PBR regeneration. I would estimate that between the 7 scenes I easily made more than 100 changes to objects, materials and lighting, which at say 15 seconds per change results in at least 25 minutes of regeneration time, this does not take into account the number of times I flipped back and forth between windows. What makes this even more frustrating is the fact that while the PBR regeneration is taking place CA is in full lock-down mode, no other work can be done during this process.

 

Lighting

Lighting was very challenging and required considerable tweaking to get things under control. As with Ray Tracing, lighting is extremely crucial to how materials will appear and shadow strength. The sun intensity was a major issue as I was generating both interior and exterior scenes. An intensity that looked good on the interior resulted in an exterior that was way over lit and as the sun intensity settings are global there is no way to have specific sun settings assigned to a particular camera.

 

Material Properties

Extremely challenging. Unfortunately, I found the little tea pot a very poor indicator of how a material will look when making changes in the material properties DBX. As such, the scene needed to be regenerated for each change for me to really see the change(s) affect. Also, as the materials properties appear to be highly sensitive to camera/light angles there were many times when I needed to flip between window views or zoom/pan to check out the effect, anther 15-20 second delay each and every time.

 

Computer Resource Usage

Very demanding on everything CPU, GPU and RAM. I actively monitored this throughout the process, as the number of PBR windows increased and the lighting complexity grew so did the computer resource usage and the time to regenerate a PBR. RAM usage was a really big surprise, never a problem before but when PBR'ing my meager 8GB was easily overwhelmed and the swapfile kicked in all the time causing further slowdowns. Every PBR regeneration maxed out my GPU which again results in slowness. The other issue with this high resource usage is that it also affected other programs such as my browser which became sluggish during PBR regeneration, likely due to my GPU being maxed out.

 

Conclusion

Despite all of these frustrations, I was reasonably pleased with the end result and would say they are as good as what I would have expect from a Ray Trace. Did I save any time over Ray Tracing, not sure and it is likely to early to say, would need more time to learn the lighting and material properties as they relate to PBR'ing.

 

Recommendations

1.) Make PBR regeneration manually activated so multiple changes can be made before regeneration.

2.) Allow windows/tabs to be changed/flipped without forcing a PBR regeneration.

3.) Improve the tea pot display reference to provide a better indication of a material property change.

4.) Restrict or allow us to allocate PBR resource usage, similar to core assignment in Ray Trace.

5.) Allow each camera to have individual settings for all camera related elements including the sun.

 

 

 

 

Thank you for posting this, it is truly helpful. 

I've been rendering 17x11 300 DPI (for print) with a maximum of 20 lights on. It takes between 3-5 minutes to render, (export the image) it is probably due to my graphic card as well. 

One thing I am truly enjoying is the walkthrough videos in PBR

I've attached some of the renders. 

6 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

 

Melissa, 

Tagging on to what Graham said above, LOD(Level of Detail) is a huge part of this. I typically offer 3 levels for exterior work: stock Chied 3d views for conceptual, Thea render views for color picking and geo-location based environment lighting, and a 3rd level thats all of the bells and whistles with landscaping etc.

Interior LOD includes bare rooms, stock entourage, or custom entourage.

I charge $1k to produce as-builts which include true wall dimensions, footing/foundation details and roof framing etc.(A complete home...which is rarely ever needed to produce plansets.)

The following home I charged $6k to produce from lines on paper to a fully realized home:

this included custom modelling and furniture importing/creating

final package was about 12 images and a PDF of the bare floor plan for furniture layout.

The background image is the actual view of the back property.

all of the colors are sampled from their respective vendors, and textures had to be created to match existing floor and cabinet finishes.

Faucets were created to match existing as well as some plants were created.

This particular job was rushed, so a lot of post processing had to be done instead of doing the work in the modelling program, which brings up mistakes.(like some of the fireflies you see and joinery not being perfect. or plants looking incorrect.)

I never provide rendering quotes based on sq.ft. the variables are too many. I have to bid the job based on my experience of how long it takes me to work a scene.

hope this helps

 

These look great!

3 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

Looks like there was an Earthquake in my Area last night anyone else seeing this kind of thing in PBR

 

I havens seen that but I randomly get lines along the walls and ceilings. 

The only thing remotely close to yours is when I work a PBR image in photoshop, certain adjustments will create something similar to what you are getting. I am not really sure this helps you at all lol

Please keep in mind these are large images, I am planning to print them

The exterior images, same camera, same settings, the only difference one is PBR the other is RT, the RT version took 2 hours VS 5 minutes for the PBR (settings etc) 

RT looks great, PBR, not so much. 

Interior, First image it looks very cartoonish, it is mostly the brass metal on the wall, I am running an RT right now and it looks much better. 

PBR-Living-Kitchen, that looks great! PBR all the way!

Hallway, looks flat, lines on the ceilings and walls, I am planning on trying with RT. 

8 minutes ago, KirkClemons said:

 

Well, actually there were several updates to ray tracing to make the material and lighting support more consistent between the two.

Ray tracing now supports the PBR textures same as the PBR rendering technique. At this point, the number of materials that contain these textures is fairly limited though.

I appreciate your comments, and I have definitely seen a difference between the beta version and the final release version. 

However I am finding inconsistencies in both, mostly on metals and other polished materials. I could share samples if you'd like