kwhitt

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!

I understand (squeaky wheel and all). All the other cameras work so precisely. I am surprised that the ortho views are not as good. Thanks again for the help. I saw your other post about leaving YouTube. I have switched to Rumble. They've got some things to work out, but the platform is coming along nicely! I hope to see you back up again soon as I always watch your vids.

Eric - I think that's what I'll end up doing. It's just a pain to get all the images to line up using this method. Thanks for your input.

Thanks Rob. I got to that very same point, but when you send them to layout, they move.

I swear they were in the same location to start. I used your method above by replicating the camera view and all was well at first. Then they started moving. I then re-centered each camera and they still move.

I'll be glad to report it, I always do, but my question was whether or not this was a known issue. Sounds like it is seeing Rob's reply. In fact, I've reported several bugs and although Tech Support responds quickly, they never seem to get fixed.

Yep, I've noticed that too... Thanks for looking at the file. Kevin

Thanks Michael. I will give your 2nd suggestion a try. Is this a known problem with Chief that an isometric camera will move?

Rob - I've tried that and eventually the camera moves (especially upon reopening the file) and the resolution here again is not high enough...