kgschlosser

I wanted to mention that the hot spots of light seen in corners and where walls/ceilings meet i a bug. It is attached to the backdrop intensity and if you set the intensity lower then a value of 1.0 it starts going away. 1.0 and above it remains the same brightness. it shows up in any corner that the opposite is on the exterior. changing the lux for the sun doesn't effect how bright it is either. I cannot figure out how to get rid of the grainy in the renderings. Nothing I do seem to make it go away.

Well I know why the ray trace performance is so bad. They are using DXR which is Microsoft's API for Ray tracing. The problem with using this is it ha a lot of additional overhead and it also doesn't use specific features that are available to enhance performance. With Nvidia graphics that is the RT Cores. That is the reason why I do not see my car use go over 50%. That's because DXR is not able to use the card to it's potential.. So going out and spending 5,000 on a video card is not going to give you performance that was worth spending 5000 dollars. This is simply because chief architect is not written to take full potential of a computer. chief architect is also not written to utilize multiple CPU cores in the best manner If it was you would see more then a single process running for it. While it does use multiple cores it lets windows handle when things get run. Spawning more processes and sharing data between the processes is faster once it is running. It does however take longer to initially start the program and has a higher memory footprint but the tradeoff when dealing with complex math and large data sets is worth it. chief architect also has a fairly large memory leak or multiple small leaks. If I leave the application running overnight on startup it is consuming 4GB of memory for the plan I am working on next day not having done any work at all (computer stays running and never sleeps) The ram use is close to 9GB and the program has an incredible amount of lag and needs to be shutdown and restart. X13 has at least twice as many bugs as X11. The largest and most annoying one is having to close and reopen chief in order to get it to redraw the 3D views for ceiling planes and to update roof planes for things like changes to the gutters.. In 3 years they haven't fixed many bugs that have been around since x11, they still exist in X13. I am willing to bet the version of Chief that was being used in those videos has code in it that uses either the Nvidia SDK or the ATI SDK to target the card being used to get the maximum amount of performance from the graphics adapter. That is why it is only taking a "few seconds" on a "lower end laptop" to do the ray tracing. doing that is complete BS because that is what I used to make the decision to buy it. It's false advertising showing a person a product and stating it is the version that was purchased when in fact it is not. In no way could any "low end laptop" render that fast using the version of x13 that is for sale, It's impossible Just to let you know I am a programmer/software engineer so I know how the code in chief is written. DXR does not use the Nvidia specific ray tracing functions from the OptiX SDK but instead uses a software based shader approach which doesn't use the RT cores in the card. I know this because of the DLL's that are loaded and not 1 function from the OptiX SDK are seen in any of the DLLs that have been loaded. The Nvidia OptiX API/SDK which is the way to utilize ray tracing with Nvidia adapters has been around since 2009. So there is no excuse as to why it is not being used. The ATI API has been around for a similar length of time as well... This is exceedingly frustrating because of the amount of time it is going to take to learn a new piece of software and there is slim pickings as far as software goes for stick built residential. Oh and after 30000 samples the renderings are still grainy They are better then when it is set to 20000 and that is better then set to 10000 so it is still improving the image at 30000 samples

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/10251/real-time-ray-tracing-setup-optimization.html 8 minutes 40 seconds, he states "I'm using a lower end laptop".. I find it rather interesting that you do not see the speed in which it is rendering on the bottom right in that video. He is not using the same software you and I are using. So the videos cannot be used as an example of the speed in which he is doing this. In the title bar it states X13 in the title bar of whatever version he is using is not x13. The one he is using more then likely has optimizations made to it to run better than the commercially available version of X13 I noticed that when I mimicked his settings identically on my machine I would not be able to click through the dialogs like he is doing with the ray tracing being viewed. I get a whole lot of spinning wheel while it loads the dialogs That is complete BS and is false advertising stating he is using a low end laptop to run the software but in reality is runs like a big fat turd on a computer that is ranked in the top 1% of commercially available computers made. Oh and those of you that stated that "passes" is the wrong term to use.. you want to check out at exactly 10 seconds. 14:30 seconds says it is able to render within seconds in the perspective floor view. NOT. takes the same amount of time as the perspective full view.

Thank you @Renerabbittfor he plethora of useful information. I have ZERO lights turn on so it's not that. I have lowered all of the sunlight and ambient light settings doing this doesn't change the speed at all. As far as the white pixels The program is going to know when there isn't enough information needed to process that pixel and it shouldn't make it white, it should grab and make a copy any pixel that is touching the one with no data. If the one that is next to it has no data then it moves onto the next. The only time it should stay white is when all 8 surrounding pixels have been tried and all of those pixels contain no information. So that is just bad programming I guess and nothing I can do about it. The surrounding pixels around the white ones have enough data to fill in properly so there is something wrong with the way the rendering is being done o the code that is used to do the rendering. But here look at this. I put the NVIDIA overlay up. how Windows is reporting GPU use is incorrect. But I am still not using more than 50% of the GPU at any time. That is the highest I have seen it go to. In this image it is at 45% use and the sample speed at a whopping 7 per second. It's not using the GPU properly plain and simple. This annoys me because I was running on x11 and brought up the speed of the ray tracing in that here on the forums. I was told that it all works in x13 and the GPU will be used to do the ray tracing. It's not using the whole GPU and it's using < 1% of the 32 logical processors my machine has.. The rendering in x13 is about as useful as the rendering in x11 and now I am kicking myself for spending the money to purchase it. I have a really stupid question. while chief isn't using my GPU to it's fullest potential it is not using my 32 logical processors at all. why would they not use every possible source of computing power available to the program for it to run? why does a program that is supposed to be so intensive not use the single biggest thing to it's advantage, SLI or CrossFire?? I can put 6 PCIe 4.0 x16 video cards in my machine if I wanted to and chief would only use one of them. how long has SLI and CrossFire been around now? Gonna have to cut my losses using chief and move to using Revit or the like. not able to render and the software not using all of the available processing power to run means the company just wants to make minor bug fixes and changes but doesn't want to stay with the times. Rendering is not new technology and after making software for as many years as chief has been around and not have a way to render built into it means they will never have a way to do it, well not one that works correctly anyhow. A software company that can't stay with the leading edge technology is a dying software company. Time to start learning something new I would rather get frustrated doing that then frustrated with trying to figure out how to get something to work correctly when it is handicapped by design and will more then likely never work correctly. If they cannot get it right in 10 years they never will.

Here you can see the rendering is running and you can see what the GPU use is. and here you can see that my video card supports everything needed.

I am using Windows 10.

IDK what else you need me to show you that shows I am using GPU rendering, it is in fact horribly slow. I am using a computer that is in the top 1% of the fastest PC's benchmarked. I am not using a crappy video card, one that is far faster then the one used in the tutorial video which has the guy stating after 30 seconds it is done. Same rendering as the last image in the last post. now at 1000 samples and it is still running and white dots seen everywhere. I circled the dots in red That took how long to render?

Samples is incorrect verbage used in Chief. The correct verbage is passes as is seen in the CPU ray tracing. Not sure why they didn't use the same verbage but they didn't. A sample would be an area of the rendering a pass is going over the rendering again adding/removing which is what is being done and you can see that is what it is doing when it is running. So from now forward I will use the word samples because that is what is in chief. I did state that I have that boxed checked in a previous post. I attached images that show ray tracing is working, i understand how you would not know if a CPU rat trace made those images of the "Physically Based" 3D view did. However I did state that the Physically Based 3D often referred to as "real time" ray tracing is anything but real time that being stated means I am using the ray tracing that is seen in the Physically Based 3D view; The numbers I have given are from what is seen in the status bar of the program (lower right hand corner). It never says "Finished Rendering" in the bottom of the program window as is seen in any other 3D view. the number of samples keeps on increasing until my monitor turns off. I do not have my computer go to sleep at all. I let it sit all last night but the rendering started over again once i moved the mouse to turn the displays back on. I do have to say that is pretty silly especially if it takes more than a minute or so to do the rendering, A person is not able to walk away and come back later when it should be finished. I have used my computer continually while the ray tracing was taking place. over 400,000 samples taken over something like 7 1/2 hours. still have white speckles and it never completes. No errors in the log and no popup errors and next to 0 GPU use while it is Ray tracing. Sometimes I manage top get 4 samples a second, most times I get 2 a second. That means to take 1000 samples it would take at best a little over 4 minutes to finish and at worst about 8.5 minutes. Problem is it never finishes and just keeps on collecting samples. It actually never finishes because you can see the areas where it hasn't Also changes I make in the Rendering Technique Options dialog for Standard view effect the Physically Based view. not sure why because it is a completely different view. Changes I make to the Standard View do not effect other views. If you change the ambient lighting settings in Standard View this changes lighting setting in the Physically Based View. Now I could understand them doing that if not wanting to duplicate controls tho it is a HUGE annoyance to have to shift back and forth between views to change them. This is not the case tho because the Line drawing controls are available in both the Standard View and the Physically based view and change those settings in Standard view have no impact on the Physically based view. Unless you have experience the Physically Based (Ray Tracing) view being horribly slow and never saying "Finished Rendering" on the bottom right you are not going to be able to help. In order to help you need to have had the problem and found out how to correct it. Making me repeat myself multiple times answering the same questions is a waste of time and frankly it's exceedingly annoying.. I am using the real time/physically based ray tracing. I have stated that a number of times. so asking me about that box being checked off is a pointless question because if it wasn't would I be doing the kind of ray tracing mentioned above? No I would not because chief does not support real time/physically based ray tracing using the CPU does it? That check box only deals with illumination or lighting. In the image below you can see the export samples set to 1000, you can also see the samples counter higher then 1000. This is a simple 4 walls and a roof plan and it has nothing else. I am not sure how it is calculating the samples per second or how long each sample is taking but it is completely wrong. Next 2 images so what the frame count is at the start and then what it is 30 seconds later. You can see the clock in the image. first image = 1992 samples second image = 4195 samples That is 2,203 samples taken in 30 seconds. 2203 / 30000 ( one hundredth of a second or 0.01 seconds is a millisecond and there are 1000 of them to a second so there would be 30000 to 30 seconds. and low and behold it is not 0.01 seconds but 7 times slower at 0.07 seconds per frame. The time seen per sample doesn't even match the number of samples per second. It is showing 0.01 seconds per pass that would be 1000 passes per second. In this case the average is close to 73.5 samples per second Now 1.5 samples per second may not seem like a lot but apply that when it says 2 frames per second now you are only getting 1/2 a frame a second which means over 1000 frames the time just went from 8.33 seconds to 33+ minutes. I bring this up because those numbers cannot be used a a way to determine the speed of it because it is grossly incorrect. I am talking from the real world time it starts rendering until the real world time when the rendering is mostly complete because it appears to never finish which is seen in the rendering itself because it shows up as white dots as well as the fact that it never states "Finished Rendering" / the sample count never stops going up even tho it is set to 1000 max samples. No errors anywhere, not in the logs and not in the program itself. The plan is not out of this world big, 3000sqft 3 floors no terrain or landscaping, no plants, basic things like bed and nightstands kind of thing. Nothing complex. All lights turned off and I get 2 to 4 samples per second according to what is in chief architect but in reality is far slower. look at the samples per second here. There is nothing in that image that would cause the sample rate to be so slow. Now look at this image why it is so slow no matter what is being rendered. Here it is down to 2 a second, again nothing that is extremely crazy.

Same image except after 200k passes. You can still see white speckles on things. It took over 4 hour to get to this point in the rendering.

Yeah I have that checked off. I also have this issue See the light coming from above the beams and below the beams? They are not lights I placed it is bleeding through from the sunlight outside. This same thing can be seen in night time from the interior lights. It comes right through the shingles in the middle of a roof plane where there would be no possibility of me not having something joined properly.

OK for those that will comment about not filling out my signature I have tried to multiple times and when I click on the save button the page gets stuck in a loading loop. So I am not able to create a signature so here is my machine specs. AMD 16 Core (32 Thread) ThreadRipper Pro @ 4.0Ghz 64 gb memory 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 Video Card Chief Architect x13 I have searched the forum and tried the things mentioned in those posts. I have also done the things in the tutorial videos. So these are questions and if other are not experiencing the same thing then they are problems that need a solution. I have spent several days tinkering with settings and making adjustments but nothing seems to work. The issue I am having is Chief is not using my video card to it's full potential. The most it uses is maybe 5-8% at any time even when doing a "Real time" Physically based 3D view. I am not sure as to why it is not using more of my video card. When I am in the real time view it is anything but real time. 10 minutes and I am still waiting for it to finish just a single frame. In the video tutorial on chiefs website the guy states "30 seconds on my laptop to render the frame". I have all the lights turned of it is daytime, sun is set to use angle. and all other settings at default values. 5 minutes later it is still rendering. Bottom right says 2000 passes and I have not seen it say complete. The number of passes are set to 1000 in the camera options so I am not sure why it is still going at 2000. I enabled the logging for ray tracing and it doesn't tell you anything other then it finding a compatible video card sp that is of no use. Is there something I am missing somewhere that needs to be set? I have used the settings found in the video tutorial to a T and it still takes forever and no where near the 30 seconds that is stated in the video.

I didn't think of that. That's a better way to go about it than what I did. This I did not know. This is probably the way I am going to go about it. Placing a wall on the floor above and pulling it down is thinking outside the box. I just didn't like having a wall on a floor that wasn't for that floor. Is there a place to make suggestions for additions to the program. It would be nice if in the wall detail there was the option to flip the walls viewing side but also be able to manipulate all of the layers and not just the framing. So if needing to do something like that I am needing to do it could be done much easier trying to get things lined up in 3D view can be challenging to say the least, if there was a way to alter the layers in 2D view like the wall detail it would be a lot easier.. That same feature would really improve what a user could do with wall coverings. I have really wanted to be able to design some pretty complex tile patterns and I have not been able to. I have another question which is partially in line with this topic. It's the same plan and it's dealing with a gable shed dormer wall. main roof is gambrel and the pitches are 25 and 3. The dormer is a 5 pitch and the ridge of the dormer is where the break is in the main roof. I do not have a hole for the dormer as the hip wall aligns with the exterior wall on the floor below. Normally the roof cuts wall at bottom is checked off for the dormer. In my use case I needed to have the wall extend all the way to the floor. So the top portion of the wall would be a siding-6 type and the bottom portion of the wall would be an interior-6. In the wall specification--> roof there is "Lower Wall Type If Split by Butting Roof.".. I have been unable to get this to work. So what I did was I made the wall a pony wall setting the wall types as stated above. I then went into 3D view and made the pony wall follow the 25 pitch roof line. That all worked out perfect. What does not work is I am not able to specify a wall covering for that wall and I also tried setting a wall covering for the room and it does not use that either. I have a tile pattern that needs to be applied to the wall and it simply will not use the pattern I provide. Is there some kind of a trick to getting it to work? I have used the wall coverings on other pony walls and not had any issue, These were horizontal pony walls and not an angle. It could be the angle that is messing it up. Maybe it would work if I could use that butting roof option so maybe someone could explain how that works.. Thanks again.

Ok so this was the goal. single wall that is not connected at one end. On th end that is not connected I wanted a pass thru. You can see what I am talking about in this image While I did come up with a way to make the wall it is a pretty big hack to do it. What I did was I created a solid railing for the bottom portion of the wall. In order to make the top portion of it I ended up making a wall directly above it on the next floor. Then in 3d view I grabbed the bottom of the wall and pulled it down and grabbed the top and pulled it down to align with the ceiling. I call this a bad hack because there is a wall on the floor above which in reality shouldn't exist and that wall can interfere with objects on that floor. I was lucky with this plan the wall does not get in the way of anything, I tried creating a pass through and that does not work as it always wants to have 1.5" between the pass through and the end of the wall. I have not found a way to remove that requirement. Chief will not allow placing a wall on top of another wall on the same floor so that doesn't work. I have tried to edit the wall in 3D mode and it will not allow me to create a "C" tho I can create a "U" which doesn't make one bit of sense. I am using X11 so if there is a better way to achieve this I am needing an education on how to do it. Thanks for the help.

OK set aside the GPU thing for the time being. My Computer has 32 logical processors, it benchmarks in the top 1% in terms of speed. I let the Ray tracing run. a few minutes before 3 hours it threw an error about photons (I think that's what it said) and never completed. But seriously 3 hours?!?!?!? Rendering to a WXGA+ resolution (440x900) 72ppi. nothing crazy. I was doing an interior render and I also tried an exterior and the same error occurred 2 hours into the render. I do not have any terrain or plants in my plan.

on the interior image the wall to the left of the doors.. Make it longer and then select the new piece. If the entire wall all the way to the door gets selected make another tiny little wall coming straight out from it where the roof intersects the wall at it's lowest spot. Open the properties for that wall and make it invisible and remove it from the schedule. Now you will be able to select the section of wall you made to fill the hole. Open the properties for that wall and click on "roof" and check off "roof cuts wall at bottom"

I have searched the forum about this and the general answer to it is a better computer is going to make it faster. I am at 1 hour and 22 minutes into rendering on pass # 13. This seems like an abnormally long amount of time. I am using Chief Architect x11 and I know it is older and with that being said rendering should be faster then what it is. I have been waiting until Chief Architect adds SLI/Crossfire support but with my recent findings it seems it wouldn't speed things up anyhow (read below). It's not a computer speed related issue I can assure you that. The compute is 2 months old and that is when I did a clean install of Windows 10. AMD Threadripper Pro with 16 cores (32 logical processors) @ 4.0Ghz 64 GB RAM M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVME SSD Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 display adapter If I have RayTracing turned on for real time 3D it takes 20 seconds or more to load and the movement is horribly choppy. I have turned off viewing all framing layers and all terrain layers including plants Thisha s zero effect on how long it takes to build the 3D or the choppy movement. I also found that no matter what I set the camera movement distances and angles to the camera moves exactly the same even tho the settings do retain the values I entered. Chief Architect uses at a max maybe 70% of my GPU and that is a spike for maybe 2 seconds, most of the time it's less than 20% and loading 3D when the shadows are turned on takes the same amount of time it did with an Nvidia GTX 1050Ti. There was a higher use of the GPU with the 1050Ti but it would appear that spending more than $300.00 on a video card has zero impact on the performance. I have also instructed Windows 10 to use the video card when running Chief Architect. Any suggestions as to what is causing these performance problems would be a HUGE help. I will not upgrade my version of Chief unless these problems have been resolved 100% and from looking at the changelog for the versions it has not been fixed. Oh. I also want to mention the massive memory leak. After a few days of 8-10 hour a day use the program will be consuming close to 10GB of memory. If I close it and reopen the same plan the memory use is < 3GB and the program runs better.