Dermot

Chief Architect Moderators
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Everything posted by Dermot

  1. So far, I believe Maureen is the only one who has contacted our technical support. We have identified Maureen's issue but I don't think it is actually related to what the other people have described. At this time, we still don't have enough information to identify and correct this problem. If you are currently using X13 and experiencing this problem, then please contact our technical support team during our normal business hours so that we can look into this further.
  2. Information about our certification program can be found here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/training/chief-architect-certification.html For other questions, you might want to contact our training department at training@chiefarchitect.com or 208-292-3400.
  3. Rooms can be temporarily kept in memory. You can see this by just drawing a 4 wall box and setting the room name to something unique. If you delete one of the walls the room label will disappear. If you redraw the wall, the room label will magically come back. There are certain operations in the program that can clear out these temporary rooms. One way to be sure that these temporary rooms have been removed is to just close and reopen the plan.
  4. Why not just open the Edit Page Information dialog and type in the labels you want? You don't really need to use the magic "#" in the label, or any blank pages, or anything else. It's just a simple text label and you can type in whatever you want to display.
  5. It's a bug. It should be marked as an exterior window but for some reason the program thinks it's an interior window. Windows and doors work a little bit differently in X13 than they did in prior versions. In X12 and prior, a window was only considered an interior window if it was a pass-thru otherwise it was always considered an exterior window. This was very different than doors which were considered interior or exterior based only on the room types on both sides. In X13, windows and doors are now treated the same. Whether it is an exterior or interior window or door is determined at the time that it is placed and it will not be changed later regardless of how you change room types, wall connections, or even if you copy a window or door from one wall to another. Clearly, if you place a bay or box window on an exterior wall (which is the only place you are allowed to), then it's windows should be considered exterior windows. For now, you can check the "Separate Trim and Materials on Both Sides" option and you should have full control over the casings and materials on both sides. In the future, you should always report these kinds of problems to our technical support team.
  6. Works for me in X12 or X13. If you want more help, you need to either provide more information or contact technical support.
  7. As long as your computer meets our minimum system requirements, you should not need a new computer or graphics card to run X13. Please see this other post I made that has some more detailed information: Regarding the missing lines for cabinet hardware, I believe that this is the result of a bug in X13. Upgrading your computer is very unlikely to have any affect on this. We are currently working on a fix for this and hope to have it available in the next update. For now, if you turn off color and then find you have some missing lines, they should come back if you use the Rebuild 3D tool. You should always report these kinds of problems to our technical support team if and when you run into them.
  8. There seems to be some confusion about whether or not you need to upgrade your computer and/or video card to run X13. The short answer is that most people probably don't. Does your computer system meet our minimum system requirements? Some people may not be able to run X13 on an older computer or one using an older graphics card even though it could run X12 perfectly fine. X13 has an entirely new rendering engine that was written from scratch that has different system requirements than X12 did. So the first thing to do is determine whether or not your system meets our minimum system requirements. If it does not meet them, then you will need to upgrade your system to run X13. For more information about system requirements, please see this web page: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html Are your video card drivers up-to-date? Is your video card configured correctly? Some people may need to update their video card drivers to solve a wide range of problems they might run into while using X13. This is because the new rendering engine is taking advantage of features on the video card that the older drivers may not support correctly. If your system meets the minimum system requirements but it is having problems creating camera views, then you should try updating your video card drivers first. If this does not solve your problems, you may need to verify that your video card is actually configured correctly. For more information about solving video card problems, please see this tech article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00106/troubleshooting-3d-camera-view-display-problems-in-chief-architect.html Do you want to take advantage of the new GPU ray tracing? Some people may want to upgrade their video card to take advantage of the new GPU based ray tracing ability. GPU ray tracing will allow you to create images that are much higher quality than you can get using Physically Based Rendering (PBR) but they are also much faster than using CPU based ray tracing. If you are happy with the camera views that you were getting in X12, then a new video card is not really necessary. Please note that CPU based ray tracing is still available and should work the same as it did in X12 and prior. If you are interested in taking advantage of GPU ray tracing, then we recommend a Windows 10 computer with either an NVIDIA RTX or AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card. Please note that GPU ray tracing is currently not available for Mac systems. For more information about purchasing a new computer and/or graphics card, please see this blog article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/computer-for-design-and-gaming/ Please feel free to contact technical support if you have any questions or need more help: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/
  9. First, and let me try to make this perfectly clear, you (as in Lauren) should not need to upgrade your computer or video card to use X13. Some people may not be able to run X13 on an older computer or one using an older graphics card even though it could run X12 perfectly fine. X13 has an entirely new rendering engine that was written from scratch that has different system requirements than X12 did. For more information about the new system requirements, please see this web page: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html In addition, some people may need to update their video card drivers to solve a wide range of problems they might run into while using X13. This is because the new rendering engine is taking advantage of features on the video card that the older drivers may not support correctly. If your system meets the minimum system requirements but it is having problems creating camera views, you should try updating your video card drivers first. For more information about updating your video card drivers, please see this tech article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00106/troubleshooting-3d-camera-view-display-problems-in-chief-architect.html In addition, some people may want to upgrade their video card to take advantage of the new GPU based ray tracing that some of the newer video cards support. If you don't care about getting higher quality images that are much better and faster than you ever could before, then a new video card is not necessary. CPU based ray tracing is still available and should work almost exactly the same as it did in X12 and prior. If you are interested in taking advantage of GPU ray tracing, then we recommend a Windows 10 computer with either an NVIDIA RTX or AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card. For more information about purchasing a new computer and/or graphics card, please see this blog article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/computer-for-design-and-gaming/ Regarding rendering differences between X12 and X13, you will likely see some differences in the appearance of materials and lighting when bringing an X12 plan forward into X13. Most of these differences should be pretty subtle and most of them can be dealt with by adjusting lighting and/or material settings. If you run into something that you think is going to be a problem then please feel free to report this to our technical support team. Please be sure to include your X12 plan along with a clear description of what is different that you would like looked into. For more information about reporting problems to tech support, please see this web page: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/ And lastly, regarding the appearance of stainless steel specifically, if this color is too light for the look you want, you might want to try changing the material properties to one of the other metal types instead, like maybe titanium. Another thing you might want to do is try using a Physically Based Render (PBR) view instead. All of the metal and glass materials will look much more realistic in a PBR view compared with a standard render view. And as always, if all else fails, please feel free to contact technical support if you need more help.
  10. Even though the combo box says "0 (Not Emissive)" the actual value is 0.2 or 0.1 as you can see in the images above. The program will automatically match .2 to "not emissive" since it is pretty close. Apparently, even very small values like this can have a big effect in the mobile viewer. We will see if we can improve these issues in the future but for now you should try setting the actual value to 0.
  11. It appears that you have some materials (walls, casing, fascia, and maybe others) that have been made emissive which is causing them to appear way too bright in the viewer. I'm not sure why you did this but you may want to turn the emissivity off. We are not aware of any differences between X12 and X13 with regards to the mobile viewer. If you do find any problems, then please feel free to report them to our tech support team: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/
  12. As far as I know, no one has actually reported this problem to our technical support team. We need more information before we can look into this further. Please remember that this forum is not part of technical support. You can find more information about reporting problems here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/
  13. That's not actually true. What makes you say this?
  14. Did you try it? As far as I can tell, if you migrate any of your settings, it looks like the scripts folder will get migrated as well. You can always manually copy them over as well.
  15. It's not clear which material you are having a problem with (interior vs. exterior, above or below)? Posting a picture of the problem area can go a long way towards helping people understand. I opened up a camera view and I could not tell what you wanted different. Also, most people are probably unavailable this holiday weekend. If all else fails, you may wish to contact tech support during their normal business hours tomorrow.
  16. No. More information about system requirements can be found here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html
  17. You haven't really given us any new information about this problem. Please report this problem to our tech support team and provide them with some more information so that we can look into this further.
  18. I'm not sure what you mean by "The mouse holds onto the current function and does not let go of it." Maybe you can explain this better? One possible issue is that you are accidently putting the camera in "spin" mode. If you are in mouse orbit mode and let go of the left mouse while you are still moving it, then the program will automatically enter "spin" mode where the camera will continue orbiting. Simply clicking anywhere on the screen should cancel this mode. The only other thing that I can think of that might be an issue is if you are having a problem with the mouse itself. I have heard of people occasionally having strange issues with their mouse if it is a wireless mouse and the battery is getting low or if the mouse drivers are out of date. If you have a different mouse you could try, that might help rule out some of these problems. You might also want to do a search on this forum to see some of the other problems that people have run into and some of their solutions.
  19. The ChiefBlog has a pretty good article with some more info: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/computer-for-design-and-gaming/
  20. See if this information helps: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00106/troubleshooting-3d-camera-view-display-problems-in-chief-architect.html#Drivers If not, then you may want to contact tech support: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/
  21. You may also want to make sure that you are using the most appropriate room "function" and not just changing the room name. For example, if the room is specified to be a garage, it will still behave like a garage even if you change the name to "boardroom".
  22. X13 is using an entirely new rendering engine using DirectX instead of OpenGL. Just because something worked in X12 with your current drivers does not mean it will work the same in X13. Please try updating your drivers (as suggested by Ed). If this does not solve your issues, then you should contact our tech support team.
  23. I don't think the Space Planning Assistant will be very helpful but you can always just place and arrange the types of rooms that you like. Unfortunately, there are not any defaults for the room types or sizes. You might have some luck with placing an office room type, adjusting the size, and then using tools like transform/replicate to come up with some initial layouts. At some point, you will have to go ahead and build the walls and continue on manually.
  24. The reason the auto story pole dimensions are messed up has to do with the truss bases that you added. If you remove these, the story pole should correctly show the roof ridge. When you run into problems like this, please feel free to report them to our tech support team. Although the problem with the story pole dimensions is a direct result of the truss bases, it still seems like the program shouldn't do this. Eric's tips about training as well as pointing out some of the problems in your plan should be reviewed because they may be very helpful. On a side note, one of the videos above mentions how you can solve the problem with having a gap between your terrain and your house. I think he is assuming that you want to keep the cantilever with your first floor and your foundation. I was assuming that you might want to update your foundation to remove this cantilever instead. At any rate, anytime you want to modify the automatic hole in terrain to deal with any special situations, I recommend that you first select the terrain perimeter and then use the "Make Terrain Hole Around Building" tool. This will generate a hole in the terrain that will match the outline of your building and then you can make any needed adjustments. Should be a bit easier than creating a hole from scratch.
  25. The short answer is no, you can't "explode" a symbol. You can temporarily remove surfaces using the delete surface tool and then convert what you have left into a new symbol as suggested by Chris.