Adrean

Thank you @SusanC it was a long project and I lot of work, but I think it is a great resource and improvement! I'm glad to have been invited to contribute and to represent Chief Architect!

carowe, you may be able to use the screen capture tool that comes with Chief to capture some tile images like your examples. We cover just this topic in this video: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/10145/creating-custom-tile-materials.html

Doug, what you are seeing in the Weighted Pendant is a known issue with OGL rendering. When there are two surfaces that have transparency values overlapping in an OGL view (like standard or PBR), the engine doesn't know which surface to draw first, and sometimes draws the surface in the background on top of the foreground surface. I believe if you were to ray trace these tests, the affect would be much diminished. As mentioned before, there appears to be a surface issue in the Arts & Crafts Pendant that we've charted for updating. Regarding the Surface Mount Tube light, we received the plan, and can see some Z-fighting happening as some of you have described. I am unable to reproduce with a new plan, so I've submitted the example you've shared to our development team for review. Thanks for sharing your experiences with us!

Very strange behavior indeed! I would not think that the behavior of the surfaces on these light fixtures would be dictated by a Template unless it is a default material issue. AFAIK the templates we distribute haven't referenced these tube lighting symbols; though a custom template that contains older copies of these objects could be a culprit. We did recently rename these items to use the word "Tube" instead of "Fluorescent" in X10 catalogs. You could open the specification of the object to see if the item has the old name. You could also use the "Replace From Library" tool on the offending objects to ensure that you are leveraging the most current version of the symbol (assuming your catalogs are up to date). If you've done all of these things and are still seeing the missing surface behavior, please submit a support ticket so we can understand and track the issue in its entirety. Feel free to share this thread's link with our support team, and I will lend what I know about it to trouble-shoot so we can get to the bottom of the problem. I'll make a note of the lighting properties that need to be improved for these objects and tackle those (I'm a little surprised that these objects are being used at all, TBH, I would have suspected we were specifying recessed cans much more frequently). Thanks for your efforts working on identifying the problem!

Thanks for tagging me, Mick! I'll log the Arts & Crafts Chandelier issue and we can get it tackled in an update. I cannot reproduce missing surfaces on the Flush Mount Tube lighting. I suspect this could be related to the "Clip Surfaces Within" setting, but to be sure, please create a support ticket that includes a plan containing the offending object. Regarding the Wayfair Catalog, we did import their 3D ready objects to convert them into a Chief Architect format, I can report this object quality issue to their team and work with them on an update for objects like these. Best,

Unfortunately, because these fireplaces are parametrically generated (like windows and doors) their surfaces are hard-coded, and not something our content team can impact. Updates to the fireplace tool would have to be made progamatically and released in a new version. If you'd like to see changes to these tools, you can send us reports via the Suggestions Thread or our suggestions e-mail and we will be sure to document them for consideration!

Love to see all of these beautiful scenes! Don't forget to post some of these images in the Gallery Section as well. We've been featuring this sort of work on our social feeds using #ChiefSpotlight. You can also follows on Facebook and Instagram.

True! Good tip! One thing I like about the elevation option is that I can add a polyline label and dimensions. The disadvantage is that it is more steps and isn't dynamic if your plan changes.

Maybe not incredibly practical or useful, but after wanting to visualize the potential sheet layout for subfloor per platform, I threw together this little hack. 1. Create a CAD Polyline that represents the floor platform for each level (there are a number of ways to generate the polyline, I went old-school and used a CAD Rectangular Polyline, then added breaks to snap it to the corners of the platform). 2. Create a new Elevation view that faces the top of your screen, make it outside of the boundaries of your model, so you don't intersect the existing structure. 3. Copy/Paste the CAD Polylines into the elevation view. 4. Convert the polylines to a solid, then apply a material that is set up with the "Brick" pattern, scaled to your sheet size. Now you you have a little sheet layout. You could use this visualize how much waste you might have at the corners of your platform, or for a variety of other things. I saved my camera, and moved it and the Solids to a new layer "Subfloor Diagram" that only displays in a new Layer Set that I created for this use.

FLOR (a carpet tile company) has this online layout tool for their products. http://www.flor.com/design-studio/ Once you come up with a pattern for a carpet design, or a full area rug design, you can take a screen capture and import it into Chief as a custom material. Set repeating patterns with texture scaling so it will fill a floor, or set area rug designs as "stretch to fit" then create a Material Region or Polyline Solid the dimensions of the rug to paint the material onto. Could be a fun way to get clients involved in part of the design process.

Chopsaw, I'll see if I can come up with something to share. In essence, my approach would be to take a screen capture of the map and/or satellite view from website, and import that into chief as a picture, scaling it and aligning it to the terrain perimeter. Next, I would find the elevation 'points' on the website's map for each corner of the lot and any other landmarks, then create correlating elevation points on the picture imported into Chief. Once you have some good anchor points, you can start bisecting them to find the midpoints, on and on until you have enough elevation points in Chief to show a reasonable topo. The example I was using was a sloped lakeside lot. The site's elevation data didn't appear to account for the existing excavation and pad flattening that has been done on the site, so for that scenario one would have to infer the elevations of flattened regions and roads and change the Chief topo accordingly after they've established a base. It did seem to give me a reasonable natural slope, though. Best,

Attempting to put together a plot plan with terrain elevation this weekend, I came across this site that I thought was handy. https://www.daftlogic.com/sandbox-google-maps-find-altitude.htm It isn't an elegant site, but you can enter the address for the property that you are working on and simply click the image to find the elevation for that "point". I was able to put together a reasonable terrain in Chief quickly using this tool. Certainly not great for a final project, but a good start for the conceptualization phase.