michaelgia

Turn off all lights, except the default light, and set that table top material to general non reflective material. 10 to 15 passes will be enough at that point.

A 3D mouse must be nice for navigating. For the rest of us I think the arrow keys are the only way to go unfortunately. At least, in X6

Step 1) go to your location and take a panoramic photo with your iPhone. Get it as wide as possible and from a distance, so that the buildings are quite small and compact looking. Take several at different distances, to experiment with.

Step 2) open your plan, go to "file" import backdrop image, and select your panoramic image from wherever you saved it on your computer.

Step 3) in "3D" go to "3D View Defaults", Backdrop tab, select Sperical Panoramic Backdrop, try 180 for Horizontal angle and 180 for vertical angle. OK.

Also, when moving around in Camera View as I mentioned in the previous post, use the arrow keys to navigate, DO NOT use the mouse.

You could use "Spherical Backdrop Options" in the 3D View Defaults. However you really need to have a large panoramic backdrop to begin with.

Just an aside, when I'm sitting with my clients, instead of a cheesy video I usually just use the "Mouse Dolly Camera" in a camera view with the "incremental move" default set to 2", and the "incremental rotate set to 2°.

Then I can pretty much just walk them through live and go wherever they want to go in the plan. They're usually more impressed with this approach believe it or not.

Try it out. It's kind of like playing Doom from the early nineties but it's actually quite helpful.

I think this is an Archicad troll...

move along, nothing to see here.

I recently bought a second-hand late 2013 MacBook Pro. The one with the dual video card in it. It has a solid state hard drive and 16gig of ram. I know it doesn't sound like a screaming spec monster that other guys are referencing but I experience no lag whatsoever and can do 10 pass ray traces in under a minute. Time machine backs it all up and I keep all my plans and layout files on iCloud so that it's all accessible from my phone or iPad.

I am constantly on the road and I need to be able to pick up where I left off at the office on my desktop (Imac)

Too many buggy and bloatware infested apps flying around windows these days. I kicked and screamed the first few months on Mac OS (certain things still piss me off) but the positives far outweigh the negatives.

Archicad is superior in every way. I took a 3 day crash course held by a sales rep in my area. He kept unlocking the trial download for several months. In the end I didn't buy though.

I was thoroughly impressed, but way too much money. Double to be precise.

It wasn't just the money though. Chief is quite streamlined and tailored for residential construction, so I felt like I was swatting a fly with a baseball bat in Archicad. Sure it gave me much more precise control over every object I drew, the speed at which I could go from floor plan to 3D rendering to construction documents in Chief was way more productive and efficient.

I do reconsider on a monthly basis though, but nah. I'll stick with Chief.

I loved the professional looking desktop interface.

Also the simultaneous construction document creation as you draw. - nice system

Basic rendering out of he box was not impressive though.

Kitchen cabinets out of the box also were quite limited.

It seemed that to really make this program complete you were required to purchase or rather subscribe to plug-ins.

Easiest way:

1) After generating your roof take a cross section and measure the distance you want to raise your roof to produce the cantilever you're looking for.

2) in a 3D full overview, select all your roof planes and click on transform/replicate tool and enter that distance in the "Z" box of the "move" section.

Voila!

I wish there was a checkbox for, "sit my bloody trusses on top of my top-plate!

As it is, I have to calculate the raise/lower above ceiling height for every different pitch I have.

Phases in Revit are not so straight forward. Also go try and build a custom kitchen in Revit. I'll see ya next year...

Hi, I use bullet points in text boxes a lot, however I also like to have my text in blue (ocean).

Problem is that the bullet points come out black and not matching the blue of the text.

Anyone know how, and if it's possible to have them blue as well?

....ya, I'm one of those.

Would really appreciate the help.

Chief should advertise this particular post. One of the most awesome examples of how amazing this community is.

...just beautiful

This is my Riverstone Ray Trace

1200 X 745

Uniform Intensity 1.0

No Photon Mapping

10 Passes

Total time = 55:41

Almost an hour on my

Imac mid 2011

Intel i5

16gig ram

AMD Radeon 512MB

(my plans usually only take 5 to 8 minutes, obviously quite a few gazillion less surfaces in my plans. lol)

I see why this isn't a popular exhibition.  It's pretty humbling if you don't have a monster machine. Although I can honestly say that I never experienced Chief as a laggy program on my computer.

I never felt the need to upgrade.

Here is my Riverstone exterior Raytrace - 10 passes, 57 seconds = 5.7 seconds per pass.

Graham

Maybe someone with a lot of clout and influence in this group could post a challenge...

- Ray-trace Riverstone plan exterior.

-They should submit the saved camera view and ray trace settings.

Then we could all submit our benchmark times along with a spec list of the machine we used.

The offer still stands. I will run a new series of Raytraces using the Riverstone plan and post them to see if we can get some traction. this time around.

Graham

I would love to see a real world speed test comparison between machines of varying specs.

Download a CA sample plan and do a perspective full overview render of 12 or so passes and then compare the times. All with same render settings of course.

Use invisible wall then

The street side grass is definitely not Chief.

Did I get that right?

Works great on both PC and Mac, really!

Your choice had more to do with which OS you prefer rather than any pros and cons with each system.

I won't go back to a PC even though I bitched the first month after switching. (Ok, the first 3 months)....

How did you ever get the Magic Mouse to have the middle scroll wheel functionality? I ditched mine for an MS mouse. I hated doing that because I replay liked the feel of the Magic Mouse but couldn't live without the scroll wheel.

Spell Check works fine in my environment with CAPS. I would not necessarily use the trackpad 100% in designing personally. I have a magic mouse and usually have external monitors for projects I spend more than 30 minutes on.

Time machine saved my but. Had my account hacked in to when my phone was stolen and they erased all my devices.

That is, phones, iPads, and Imac. (My phone wasn't password protected, stupid me).

There's a lesson for ya. Allways password protect your phone.

Ok thanks.

I learned something at least.

Not the tool I was looking for but I guess it can come in handy...

Ok page 1024 of X6 manual.

Special Use Arrows - got it.

It only returns the difference in height with floor 0.

Doesn't help if I have different height walls in my foundation.

Of course I only used the indicated example of "Foundation Wall Height 1"

Manual is sketchy as to what other macros I can input.

Is there a list somewhere?

I tried "Stemwall Height" but that didn't work.

Would you be able to tell me what macro you used to get the two different heights in your example?

...please?