CADustin

Wood builder update is still forthcoming, I found some crossed wires I gotta work out first, so just the tile update first... For specific tile patters/shapes/rotations/layouts I have to manually build them and feed them into the builder which can take some time, so the best practice is to add the shapes/features that add the most bang for the buck as we add more and more options. We try to cover the basics as best we can with the player, but if you're hyper focused on tile or materials in general, maybe take a look at substance designer for custom stuff. If you wanted to take a deeper dive, substance designer can make anything you need, but it's what I use to make chief materials so there aren't any grout sliders or tile drop downs. You have to make everything yourself. Substance player is just letting you tinker around with what I've already made so if I haven't made it for a chief catalog yet, it won't get added to the player. It's super fun software though, so if you find yourself always looking for a specific tile, maybe its worth an afternoon to try and make it yourself with the trial and hit me up here at chief if you have any questions. It's neat software, especially if you're kitchen/bath focused. Maybe we can start feeding other peoples tile layouts into the builder too

Tile Builder.sbsar got an update today (grab it from the first post on this thread, same place you got it the first time.) Let me know if you guys are finding any issues or bugs, don't call Chief tech support, this is my responsibility to fix and maintain. Changes Made... -Added some new Shape options Changed Large Tile to 1:1 Large Tile Added a 2:1 large Tile Triangle Pattern Elongated Hex Elongated Diamond Added image inputs on each material drop down -You should see a slot to add your image appear when selecting ~image input in the “Tile X Material” dropdown. --This is a little tricky under the hood and whatever you add will still go through the color blenders, I'm still chewing on how to mitigate this since there's a lot more going on under the hood with the tile builder compared to the wood Builder. Added a Material Invert for those that want white marble with grey veining instead of Black marble with White veining, etc. I hope to eventually give you guys more control over the colors of these kinds of things but that's a heavy lift. Till then this should help you guys get darker veins on white marble.

Also, sorry I missed the question... Yes, the newest versions will always be on the first post of this thread. The second post will have updates listed by date, and usually I'll make an announcement in this thread just to bump it to the top and let people know. If you think you are missing an update, e mail or msg me here on ChiefTalk and I'll check it for you and get you a fresh copy.

I see what you mean... I rotated it in windows picture viewer and sure enough, it didn't rotate in substance player but when I rotated it in photoshop, it DID rotate in substance player. After trying it again, in the windows picture viewer, if you click the "Edit and Create" and Drop down to "Edit" that gets you to a more robust edit screen that also has a rotate button. Rotating it here then "saving a copy" on the bottom right DID work correctly in substance. Just gotta save a copy in the edit screen I guess for it to make an actually rotated copy instead of windows trying to fake it. See Attached. Let me know if it' still giving you issues.

Hey gang, great info... - Thanks for the brick list, I'll look into a brick builder next time I get into a brick catalog for Chief or the next time I get a window of time. If anymore ideas come up just put them up on this thread and I'll re-review before I start it. -Lakeside, Good catch. I'll look into adding a rotator to the image input, till them you can just open the image in windows basic picture viewer (or apple equivalent) and rotate it there before added it to the wood builder.

Hi Dianne, I think a brick builder would be fantastic. If you have a sec, can you tell me what all you would need it to do? So far... -Mortar Color -Brick Color -Investigate Soldier Brick Options ???

Hey Emily, The tile builder has a "Picket" option that kind of matches your shape and you might be able to get what you need from that, to dial in your specifics you'll have to... 1. Export a "PICKET" tile from substance player and bring it into photoshop, you can use the BASE COLOR map to paint whatever stone or colors you want using the grout as a guide. 2. Import your maps and newly colored BASE COLOR into chief and ROTATE it 90° so your picket is going left-to-right. From there uncheck the "Keep Aspect Ratio" in your material dialogue and reduce the width of the texture to squish it closer to what you are after. It won't be exact but pretty close for a 30 second tile...Getting everything super exact exact would require a decent chunk of photoshop time. Hope this helps, if you run into any snags let me know.

Lookin' Sharp!

I added Tin Ceiling tiles to my to do list, but if you have any specific brands you'd like to see in Chief let us know and we'll try to get in touch with them. Beyond that, if you could post a picture of what you're looking for, I'll have a better idea of what kind of tin tile to add to my list or might know of a place where you can get it now. Should be fun to make.

Yep, just re download the wood builder from the 1st page and you should see shiplap in the "cut" drop down.Yep, just re download the wood builder from the 1st page and you should see shiplap in the "cut" drop down. Let me know if you don't see it.

Hey WestChester, I just tried to download them and had to sign out and sign back in and they came down fine, if you still can't download them, msg me your e mail and I'll send them to you direct. Thanks Renee, glad they are working out for you.

You can right click on the camera in plan view and select "Save Camera" or select the camera and hit the "Save Camera" button in the bottom left edit toolbar.

My guess would be that the edges of the plant had a little bit of transparency and it got lost along the way somehow. Not sure how though. If you e mail the image to me, I can take a look. Dustin@chiefarchitect.com

For Sketch up and CAD type modeling, I've found that the real killer is the resolution of your shapes aka your Level of Detail (LOD). Using Alaskan Sons well done example, if I was going to make a ring in sketch up, rings are made with a circle looped around with another circle looped over each individual segment. So the polygon count is going to be the number of segments used to make these circles multiplied together, so we need to things like how large and visible this ring is going to be. Is it a large part of some lighting fixture that needs to look smooth and rounded or is it a pull on some cabinet hardware? Knowing where it's going will help you pick your battles on where to spend your polygons. Example A Example A has 60 segments around the circle and 60 sides around each segment which makes a very smooth looking ring for a grand total of 7200 polygons. But wait! 60x60 is 3600! It is, but all your quad surfaces will get divided by two into tri's on export so we double our count to 7200. Example B Example B has 16 segments around the ring and 6 sides per segment, doubled for Tri's for a much more Chief friendly 192 polygons. So by reducing the ring segments and sides to something more manageable, we can drastically reduce our file sizes. Add on top of that, AS's correct point about removing what isn't visible/needed. If we assume these rings are going to be pulls for our kitchen cabinets, we know that they'll be very small, and no one will see the backside. Looking at both rings together at a reasonable distance shows that we don't need all that detail in this situation and our low poly example with 192 polygons would be the better choice, more so if you ripped off the back of the ring leaving 16 segments and 4 sides for 64 x 2 = 128 per pull, lets say 10 pulls in the kitchen, 1280 polygons total for our pulls, still way less than if we used just one ring from example A. And when you pull back they look pretty much the same... Sadly, getting to a lower resolution is something that I'm unfamiliar with in Sketch up so I'll step aside and let some pros step in to help you with that but this might help get you started... https://help.sketchup.com/en/making-detailed-model-lightweight-way I'm curious how this works out since it's a question I get often during IBS/KBIS, keep us informed and let me know if I can help you out. Thanks, Dustin

It shouldn't matter, B2M is just another software they make unrelated to what we're doing. Gotta say, I'm baffled. My guess is your Intel® HD Graphics 5500 is probably the culprit but I've got no way of verifying it since I don't have a machine with those specs anywhere. Chief has also had tech related/performance issues with these onboard chip sets. My hunch is that it's something on their end only because it's a black screen before you even load a file. At this point I'd say your best bet is to ask for help here... https://www.substance3d.com/contact/ and mention your specs, maybe intel chipsets are no longer supported? Maybe an update walled them off? They would know if anything changed. Also mention that you had it working before then it just stopped, that might help them narrow it down. Please let me know if they say anything that helps just in case they deduce that it's something that I can fix for you on my end.

Hmmm, it sounds like it's a problem with the player software. Some folks have had issues with specific panels going black, but I haven't seen anything about the entire thing going dark. Here's someone that has some black panels that got it fixed, maybe this might work If not, that forum would be the best place to ask for assistance. https://forum.substance3d.com/index.php/topic,22997.0.html Let me know if this also is a dead end, and also... PC or mac? Video card? Windows version if PC? I'll keep poking around and looking for fixes.

Hmmm...Not sure. Is it only for tile builder or do other builders also show black screen? I would say try to update your video card drivers and if that doesn't work try opening substance player, and hit F9. If this works you should see a "Select Substance Engine" pop up, from there you can try a different engine and see if that helps. More times then not though its just video card drivers. Let me know how it goes, if it's still broken we can dig a little deeper.

Hey Faruk, You didn't do anything wrong. With that tile scaled so large, even at 2048, we'll run into some confusing scaling issues... An 8 tile wide image at 2048 pixels = 256 pixels allotted per tile. 256 pixels across 48" gets us about about 5.3 pixels per inch when the 2:1 tile is at this scale. Since the maps need a minimum of 3 pixels to form a grout line (one descending to the grout, one for grout, one ascending) your grout comes out to about half an inch wide, which is why you're seeing such chunky lines in Chief. or Each tile is 48" wide. 48" x 8 tiles = 384" wide 2048/384 = 5.3 pixels per inch Sorry if this is confusing. Also sorry if my math is wrong So... 1) Until I get a chance to do an update, you can try the max 4096 which will reduce your current grout width in half (about 1/4" wide) 2) If you can find the specific type of tile you're after and e-mail it to me at dustin@chiefarchitect.com I might have something to help you out in the short term. 3) For the long term, I've put "Large Format" 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, and 4:1 on my update list for my next pass on the tile builder. This will set a lower tile count on the image so you'll get more pixels per tile, thus smaller/thinner grout capability. As for the most recent updates, I just post them on original post in this thread and the following post is where I note the updates. I usually refresh this thread with an update notification as well. So if you see me post an update, go ahead and throw away your old version, get the newest version from the first post and check for updates on the second post. Or just ask me , I'm always poking around this thread.

Also, for ShawnHayes, I forgot to add that the wood builder also now has a shiplap option.

Hmmm...I haven't heard of any crashes on the fabrics yet. I'll take a look. Does it give you an error message or just freeze up?

Yeah they are the same company, and got bought by adobe last year I think, maybe two. Gang, I updated the wood builder today with some better looking knotty/rustic options and added an image input so you can load your own wood images and slice them into flooring. ReneRabbitt requested it and I love it. Let me know if you guys run into any problems with it and I'll look into adding it into the tile builder as well. -To access it you need to set the Wood_Species to ~Image Input and load an image into the slot at the bottom. -Use seamless textures when using the image input for best results.

Hot stuff ^

Should still be free. You're looking for Substance Player. https://www.substance3d.com/substance-player/ If you are looking at Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Substance Alchemist, etc, you are on the wrong page. Let me know if it doesn't work for you.

That's a good idea, I've put it on my list for updates. When i swing back around on wood I'll be sure to add some shiplap options.

Ok MauiDave, I ran some tests but couldn't reproduce your error so I'll need a little bit more info... Here's my export settings that I use, it's most all defaults. I would recommend trying to export something from the wood builder beta and see if that can get your files exported, if not... Double check that your file path location isn't locked down in anyway, try exporting to the desktop. Try hitting F9 to try a different engine, I don't know what kind of machine you're running but I've got Direct3D 10 and SSE2 as options on mine and both work, I use Direct3D 10. Let me know if you are on a mac, I'm on windows which might be why I can't reproduce it. Try exporting one output at a time and see if you are hanging up on just one or all maps. Get back to me and let me know if any of these work. Thanks Dustin