kwhitt

Mark - thanks for the reply. It sounds like you are saying that Chief is capable of reflections through refractive glass. I tested your theory about the reflective objects inside a symbol and it didn't seem to make any difference. I deleted the tile shower symbol and moved the mirrors outside of the wall cabinet framing and the results were the same. It takes about 35 seconds to export CAM04 on my machine. I've had no problem. If it's true that Chief can do what I want, it sure would be nice if someone could render my scene on the recommended graphics card. That said, it looks as though Mick has already done that and got the same results as me... Thanks again for the time, Kevin

Sorry for being dense, but that's a "NO" to my original question and tech support is incorrect? @MarkMc - Mark - in your sample file, you had refractions disabled? Thanks all, Kevin

Rene - thanks for the reply. I am still not sure what I am looking at here. Does the glass you show in the image above have refraction enabled or is this your general material hack? Or have you disabled refractions in the PBR DBX? I still don't feel like I've got an answer to my original question. Is Chief capable of showing reflection behind refractive glass if I have the right graphics card? Nathan in tech support told me yesterday that it was possible. @MarkMc shows it in his sample file. I don't have the recommended card, so cannot test. If not possible to do what I want, I doubt I'll spend thousands on another machine when I just bought one in September 2020. Thanks again for your help with this matter, Kevin. You are probably right about the textures being too high res. I come from a background where we would render 4k plus images and the higher res textures are necessary. In fact, I have an entire library of texture maps some of which go up to 8k. I agree it is overkill for a less than 2k JPG image out of Chief. I didn't bother lowering them as my machine can handle it.

Mark - I never thought about the shower tile being one huge symbol. It may be preventing light from accessing this area. The mirrors at the wall are also sunken inside a wall cabinet that makes up the frame. I'll do some more testing without the shower tile symbol and report back. Thanks, Kevin

@Kbird1 - That still doesn't explain the problem with CAM07 attached. The metal on the handshower does not reflect when viewed through glass. It may, again, be a material problem and can be resolved using the Shiny Metal with higher roughness. I'll test that later after I've done some real work. The door casings and cabinet fronts appear to have had reflection from the very beginning as they are only specular highlights (not true reflections). It's starting to appear as though my RTX5000 card is quite capable after all.

@Kbird1 More testing... It's the mirror material that's the problem. When I change it to a shiny metal with the attached settings, it works fine on my RTX500 even through physical glass. Of course, bloom doesn't show through glass, but that is a limitation of most render engines. Attached is the scene file. Would you mind running it on your RTX3080? Thanks, Kevin Reflections Behind Glass.plan

@MarkMc - Mark - is the glass a general material as Rene suggested or a real glass material with refraction? Would you mind posting the scene file, so that I can test? If what you're saying is right, then reflections do occur behind glass. I'd really like to come to a conclusion today before I drop thousands on a new machine. @Kbird1 - Mick - If Mark will provide the scene file, would you mind trying it out on your RTX3080? I'll make a similar attempt with the RTX5000 card I have now. I tried the scene file you posted and couldn't get it to work properly either.

Mick - I just tested your file and I can't get it to work either. I think the only reason the invisible tick worked on my bathroom scene is that I have shower channel around the perimeter. The glass is not there and only appears to be as it's surrounded. The shower door hinges were added manually as they weren't oriented correctly to be added in the door DBX (notice the door handle is missing). So, it appears that reflections behind glass do not work with the RTX3080 either. I will call tech support again today as Nathan told me it was possible with the right graphics card. This is disappointing. @Renerabbitt - I watched your guest appearance on Dan Bauman's 3rd episode of What's New in X13 - very helpful. You do mention this problem with the glass door cabinets in your scene example; however, switching to a general material with transparency eliminates all refraction which is key to photorealism in glass. I don't agree that this workaround should be accepted as "the nature of the beast" as there are plenty of real-time rendering engines that deal with refraction correctly (in fact all of them do of which I am aware). I imagine Chief will eventually solve this problem and your "fix" is the best we can do for now... The refraction issue aside, it's still a rather robust rendering engine and the results are impressive.

Good morning, Mick. I did a test on the RTX5000 with wall set to invisible and it works - see attached! It also seems that the refraction of the glass is intact (see area near shower door hinges). I believe the blue area you highlight on the pocket door is a reflection of the sky from glass block windows. I purchased the RTX-5000 card in September of 2020 before X13 came out. At the time I had no intention of using Chief for photorealistic work, so had the machine optimized for Corona Renderer within Cinema 4D.

Sorry Mick. I just read your signature line and see that you have the RTX 3080. Yes, please run a test on the file I uploaded. I included all texture maps too. I am particularly interested in seeing CAM04 from inside the shower. Thanks for taking the time! Kevin

Thanks Mark. I appreciate you confirming that it can be done with the right card. I've been wondering when we might have another Webinar about cabinetry. I learned so much from the one last year. Now that we have the capability for specifying reveals, it's completely changed the way I design cabinets. The cabinet DBX has been my favorite implementation in X13. I have to say it's an impressive release! Kevin

Hey Mick - I also render using the Corona plugin for Cinema 4D (or at least I did a lot of it before I found Chief). The computer purchased in September 2020 is a real workhorse for the CPU rendering engines. I am not sure what it's missing, but it certainly doesn't work as I'm not getting the reflections behind glass. Nathan from Chief tech support confirmed that I should be and I'm glad to see confirmation in Mark's post. I would probably not spend the money on a new machine if reflections through glass weren't possible. When I saw Chief's new engine required the RTX series, I was excited knowing I had an RTX 5000 card - thinking it was an even higher end card than the minimum spec. Then I found out the RTX-5000 was a Quadro card and Chief requires Geoforce. Sorta' misleading with the naming convention... I was considering the RTX-3080, but as the 3090 was only $700 more I was convinced by the machine builder that I'd get much better performance from it. Besides, the new generation Geoforce RTX series is so much cheaper than the Quadro RTX-5000 when I purchased last year. I'll keep the other machine for CPU-based rendering though... So that I understand, what card is it you have now? I would appreciate you testing out the scene I posted about earlier. As far as I know Chief has not published any benchmarks and I'd be curious how quickly you are able to render CAM01. As usual, my files are huge (compressed at 209MB). Here's the Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xjthruttitihn17/Master Bath Scene_07-12-21.zip?dl=0 Mark - If you've got the time, it would be nice seeing CAM04 from inside the shower with reflections in the mirror... Thanks, Kevin

That was the new PBR in X13, however, real time ray-tracing isn't supported with my card. Although the preferences within Chief says it is!

Mick - I just got off the phone with tech support as I'm buying a new machine and wanted to see how to optimize it for X13. The RTX-5000 card in the computer that I purchased in September of 2020 is old generation stuff although it cost a lot more than most cards. To get those reflections, you need the RTX-3080 or RTX-3090 as specified by Chief. So, reflections behind glass are possible with the right card. I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to hardware, so I use the folks at Puget Systems - they're fantastic! I will check out Mark's file with the new system... I'm already blown away by the realism and I don't even have the correct card yet...

I've been experimenting with PBR in X13. Wow! I am impressed that the results are so photoreal. I have a question in regards to reflections. In the second image below, I am in the shower taking a shot of the vanity. Is it not possible to pick up the reflections behind glass? Is there a setting I am missing or is this a limitation of the software? I thought ray-tracing in X12 was capable of this. Thanks, Kevin

Thanks Mick. I didn't know about the symbol forum. The download is the CALIBZ file with the textures. There are 9 texture maps all at 2K. I keep my materials fairly high-res, but someone could always reduce them. Kevin

Thanks Mick. I got the towels working. Before I was using a non-square image that I had to manipulate in Cinema 4D to hit all the right spots on the UV map. This custom placement would open in other apps after export using Collada (i.e. - FormZ and SketchUp), but not without errors in Chief. I created some seamless textures in Substance Designer and I guess, since they are tiling, they work fine in Chief. I'd still like to know why I can't get a combined image map to align with the UV's in Chief. Anyway, the turned out fine. Below is a link for the towel assets if anyone wants them. They have 2k textures, so too big to upload to the forum. https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3isf8w393blr17/towels_hanging.calibz?dl=0

A quick update after more experimenting today... I was using a mapping type known as planar mapping in Cinema 4D before generating UV's. Planar mapping is a mapping type that projects a texture onto a single plane (face of an object) and has a shrink wrapping effect on the other faces that are pointing away from the planar normal. Evidently this type of mapping is foreign to Chief Architect. That said, I'm not sure why it made any difference as I generated UV's that Chief should still be capable of reading. When I switched to cubic (and cylindrical mapping for the bullnose) before creating the UV's, it worked. I also used Collada 1.4 upon export. I noticed that it was necessary to triangulate upon export, so that there were no missing faces when brought into Chief. The shower tile now looks good (image attached). I'll now focus on the problem with the towel and report back.

Chief has definitely got some issues with UV maps. I spent a couple hours yesterday creating custom tile for a shower in Cinema 4D as a second experiment. The first image below is how the tile is intended to look with bullnose corners and tile chair rail molding at the top. The second image is how Chief butchers it upon import! How is it people are able to create their own assets for use in Chief when it appears it cannot get the UV map correct upon import? I will go ahead and get this reported. This problem makes it impossible for me to move forward with this project as I had intended and I suspect this would be no easy fix for Chief. Chief - Does the software allow UV's outside of 0 to 1 space? Also, are overlapping UV's permitted? This is the only thing I can think of that might be driving the problems I'm having. I know we have a new render engine with X13. Could this be the reason? In X12 I made hundreds of assets and never encountered these problems...

Thanks Mick. I have tried everything I can think of. I use UVLayout by Headus which is the best unwrapper I've ever used. It has to be an issue with Chief as I get the expected results in all of the other software I use. I'll wait to hear if someone else has a workaround before submitting a bug report. Thanks again - the "me too" helped!

Here is the Chief file (X13). This was imported from Cinema 4D via 3DS. As mentioned above, I tried various other formats with no luck. The OBJ import for some reason had missing polygons, so this was useless. towel_folded_body.calibz

I've been attempting to create some assets for a bath renovation I have coming up. Something is screwy with the way Chief is interpreting/importing UV maps. I am able to open the attached towel model (3DS) in Cinema 4D, AutoCAD, SketchUp, FormZ, 3DS Max, Marvelous Designer (where it was created), and Substance Painter all with the UV's intact. I have tried exporting the model out from Cinema 4D via OBJ, COLLADA 1.4, COLLADA 1.5, DWG, DXF, 3DS, and SKP. The result is always the same jumbled UV mess. Something within Chief changes the UV map as when I export out of Chief there is a noticeable change to the map when opened in Cinema 4D. And, yes, "Use Imported UV Map" is checked within the Chief Symbol Specification DBX. I have also tried both X12 and X13 with the same result. My UV map is perfect and both textures I intend on using align with the UV map. I have also tried different image formats (TIF, JPG, PNG, etc.). The image maps have been flipped vertically and horizontally in PhotoShop and still the problem persists. Below are some images illustrating what I'm getting from these experiments. Anyone else run into this? Is there a combo of file format, image format, UV orientation that anyone has found will work? This is making it impossible to build my User Catalog. Thanks, Kevin towel_full_isolated.3ds

Kyle - thanks for the feedback. Good looking floor plan BTW. Unfortunately I have three of these layout boxes on one page. When I get one or two in the correct position, the remaining layout box goes crazy. If this were only one layout box, I could close the camera view, position as needed, and call it done. I am now unable to even export the view as an image unless I accept the low-res active window size. When I increase the resolution, the images skew and are unusable.

I've decided to export a higher res image instead of using live camera views. I'm running into another problem now. When I increase the resolution on export, the image is skewed. The first attachment is using active window size (no problem), the second and third images have been increased to 2K in width with "retain aspect ratio" checked. What's happening here?

Thanks Eric!