VisualDandD

I used to 'back in day' when chief came with a printed 2+" manual in the box, sit down from time to time with the manual to explore ways to use the program. It would do me good to continue the habit in the electronic form. I am 'learn by doing' guy and only called tech support one time (back in 1999). I drew a home that exceeded Chiefs ability to move from model to line drawings when sending to layout. I remember when one of the guys from Chief explained that you can use CAD boxes (altered to any shape) along with the "Edit Area" function. This is now part of my 'go to' items I use ALL the time when making revisions. Such a simple little thing that saves SO much time making edits. Some day, I need to make it to one of the user group gathering. I am sure that even after 20 years there are some of the most simple functions I have missed over the years! Thank you @TeaTime for the help!

WOW....how did I miss that one! Now I have to sheepishly ask how long we have had that feature As long as I have been using Chief, I realize there is so much that I dont yet know it can do! THANK YOU!

My ways of doing it would be to elim the 'landing' and replace with a solid at same ht so sections dont recognize it as a connection point and then manually place 2 stair sections in. But I would probably just fudge is and do as below and then use a solid to fill in stringer/riser area of run 1

Hate to ask what might be a 'dumb' question.... I have done work arounds in the past but wondering if I missed something or a better way to do it. Currently running x14 (have not taken time to install X15 yet My basic question is: Is there an easy way to alter individual stair component run styles/properties of a stair composed of multiple sections? Eg: In my specific example, I want the #1 run of stair to NOT be open underneath. Then I want the #2 set to be open riser w/ one center stringer. I am wondering if I missed an easy way to this that may have been introduced in recent years. Thanks

Interesting! I dont ever mess with PS. I have a super old version it from like a decade ago that barely runs on win 11 I brought the DAE of the terrain from SU into Chief so I could add the 3d elements. Roads, structures, prop lines (transposed off surveys)...etc Are you saying there is another workflow that will work? I was tasked with not just making a pretty picture but representing the property in true scale and layout proposed roads, entrances, guard home placement and see what size structure the island itself could accommodate and the client specifically wanted a "120' pool". I would LOVE to learn more about the gradient map import as it seems like a GREAT way of getting backdrop context. My 'lake' is a 'slab' that I had to cut (roughly) around the coves as the GIS info is conflicting and small differences of a few feet VASTLY change the shape of the coves. To get past this I made 'slabs' for the lake and converted to water material in TM. Also the SU gis topo changes accuracy with level of zoom, so I did one zoomed to extents of property itself, and then a larger one (really big) with the entire area. This got a little glitchy meshing them all together to be faithful. LOVE to hear any of your thoughts! Your PS work (and all your work really) is quite stunning. Mine is a little more rough and certainly less polished

You can do some pretty cool stuff w/ chief and TM. I have found the limit recently! You run into glitches with HUGE models in chief. I did several square miles of lake to model this estate plot for a perspective buyer. The lot is only 12ac but I did more than a sq mile to give it context. This is 4 models combined. All DAE files. I used GIS topo draped over aerial imagery in sketchup. Then I brought some of the smaller DAE models into chief and added Chief elements to represent the 20,000 sqft home and how it might be laid out. This is nothing about a home design, but all about showcasing what the land can be. The only problem comes in with LARGE dae files in chief. Once you exceed a certain size and bring them in, you cant attempt to resize them or they will auto shrink to the a default size (smaller). That must be the max that Chief allows. So as long as you dont have to mess with them, you are OK. Lots of 'work arounds' go into doing this, but it gets the job done. It takes some fun work arounds to bring in DAE's into chief and then work to add to them in Chief as you lose reference. The DAE just imports as a large rectangle. To deal with this I imported 'pictures' and used resize and point to point. While putting a 3d solid reference points so I could cross reference in 3d to get everything properly aligned. Not the best renderings, no grass or other things that would really 'pop' but the purpose was to show what the land could become. The sports fields are just for scale. When you get that much land, you need some way of relating to the space. It might seem a little over the top with 3000sqft guard house and 120 foot pool and 20000 sqft home, but that is what the client requested to see if it would fit and how. Given the property is 12mil, I guess that makes sense. Guessing this would end up being a 20-30mil estate if they purchase the land. I like trying to do things that you are not really sure how it can be done. Working with Chief for many years, 'work arounds' just make you better.

Home currently under mold remediation The 'bad' thing about Chief is it will automatically build some roofs that no one in their right mind would ever think to construct in that manner. The funniest part, is the guy does not even point out all the issues he has with water and only is trying to fix cosmetic ones..... My guess is that guy is no longer designing homes.... Or should not be.

In my experience chief generates all kinds of those in vector view. (they dont appear in the standard render) I deal with them in 2 ways. 1- for most exterior elevations, I send to layout as plot lines and then delete the small unwanted lines. 2-for most interior sections, I 'create cad detail from view' and do the same....delete unwanted lines.

Thank you for the well thought out AND informative response. In Twin motion, one does has a decent amount of controls. You have a camera exposure, but you can also play with environmental light and then of course direct sun light. I choose to use all dynamic skies (meaning it is rendering my actual sun and sky for all the light). There are HDRI sky models which if you are a noob, you can get good results faster, but I find to get (my) best images, I want a true dynamic sky. Getting that blue sky is tricky depending on sun positioning. (it is easy with a sky backdrop) Same exact lighting environment in both these pics but different sun orientation to the camera. I just try to get a little better each time I play with this stuff. But I might actually be seeing more a demand for it which is why I am back playing with it. Thanks for you help!

@Doug_N this is where it is actually going. I did a model of the lake island for the builder. I did not use it as the 'back drop' since the builder was not sure what lot he was placing the house one. What I did was really a 'proof of concept', but when I insert it in my actual site model, I think it will really 'pop'. This is the model of the actual lots and cove (also this was in what I consider 'rough' as I did not do grass...etc). But the homes on here were just sample homes I had lying as place holders to see scale. This is GIS data of the entire lake area, converted into a skp file in sketch up with an aerial image overlay. Then brought into chief and converted into a symbol. Then exported as DAE and into TM. I did a little experimentation on how in TM I could improve the look of the imported terrain. There is one still I did. If you look at right hand shore line of fist pic, I have a nice rocky transition that looks a lot better. vid was rendering without RT. Quality will come up to stills...but of course A LOT more detail would need to be added.

I was given a sample vid (of a real social media campaign of an actual home for sale) from realtor to emulate. It will go out on social media. They wanted it less than a minute. I get you, but in todays tic tock/instagram/facebook, even the 56 seconds is long. Instagram used to limit stories to 25 seconds.

Since I have very little experience with post processing. Can you give me an idea from the one rendering I just did (first time I attempted to render any significant motion vid) what type of improvements post processing might yield? It is WAY outside my wheelhouse and I dont even claim that rendering in general is something I consider myself skilled at. I just know enough to mess with it now and again. But IF post processing would yield good results, what might they be and what is the time involved vs said improvements? Appreciate insights from someone in the know on this. For the vid, I just verified and adjusted my render setting on stills and then let it run. 100% honesty, All the scenes have identical settings (which I know I could improve if I set each camera with different optimized settings). I am just trying to balance out what real improvements can be had vs actual time investment and trying to get an understanding whether pursuing post processing would be 'worth' it. Thanks for any input, this is the video I would love feedback on.

If chief really wanted to improve rendering (which it seems they do), I vote they should include geometry for siding materials.(and corners) Eg show the actual siding in 3d (which could be further enhanced with bumps). This geometry could perhaps be defined by molding profile DBX and be defined (or rotated) for materials like vert vs horiz siding. We all know the poly count would go up, but we are in a day where the GPU's can handle it. Lap siding, even with bumps, does not show well in 3d. Board and batten....well that is the reason so many try to do manual applications for good renderings. I am not suggesting this is necessary. It is my feeling that Chief should stop focusing on rendering. BUT if chief wants to produce good renderings, showing siding in 3d would be the single largest leap forward that I think they could make. This difference would be a HUGE leap in the quality of the rendering.

Nope. Clearly shown in graphic example of sqft envelope that they fully count them on both floors. They then have a break out to show specifically how stairs are measured on 2nd floor. to where you only count the actual area of stairs and NOT the open to below area. The old....picture is worth 1000 words is easy on this one. Look at their examples.

Actually I used to think this way, but I realized there are differing ways of measuring sqft. I would often notice that appraisers would do a home I drew and it would always be 100-200+ sqft larger than what I drew. I just assumed they were not good at doing thier job Turns out, I was the one that was wrong. There is actually an ANSI standard published on how to calculate square footage. Appraisers are required to use this standard when calculating 'living area'. It goes to the outside of the envelope. Outside of siding or brick. With brick, it adds approx 200-300sqft to a home. Always notice brick homes appraise for more, part of it is they measure more! Also the odd one is stairs are measured on BOTH levels. This is quite different than the construction standards which have always been face of stud and stairs on one level. Here is a link to the standard: https://www.homeinnovation.com/-/media/Files/Standards_Development/Square_Footage/2020_Z765/ANSI_Z765_-_DRAFT_20200207_-_no_cover_art.pdf

@Renerabbitt I wish I had better PS skills. I know enough to be dangerous, but there are definitely times where PS would be easier than re-running some things. Your talent is evident. Really cool and equally as impressive!

Yep, you sum it up quite well. I very much enjoy rendering. Just never found a way to justify the time it takes me to do it and what the 'market will bear' as far as compensation goes. I was doing VR stuff years ago (I still love that for getting the 'feel' of spaces. Hell, now it is almost easy with so many software packages integrated. Anyway, it comes down to working with good people who appreciate your talents. I have been lucky that appreciate what I do. I have hopes to do more, but I am not holding my breath. I have had clients who sub out to overseas renderings, and I will be honest that the final product is nice in many cases. Many of them have to draw the homes as well. (I wont share CAD files with clients, only the PDF const drawings). So the overseas rendering people have to draw everything. I cant imagine how it can be worth their time. Working from a CORRECT chief model would be do-able. I could see that working. But there are lots of good guys out there such as @Renerabbitt who occupy that space. (Your work is incredible and I would not hesitate to refer anyone to you for your quality). Rendering is such a fun creative process and it has come such a long way in the past 20 years. I can remember using the Pov-Ray on old chief. Watching the tiny dots fill in hour by hour. Only to realize you wanted to change a small thing and have to start all over again RTX is/was a game changer for me. It made/makes rendering so much more practical. I will draw the digital vs film camera analogy. RTX has made rendering easier in the way that digital cameras make people better photographers. If you do 20 images, you are bound to catch a good one . "Back in the day", the processing took so long, you really had to know how to set up an image. You could not afford to clog your computer up for 9 hours rendering a image that ultimately would not be useable. Not so with RTX. Your 'misses', just take a minute to generate and are no big loss in productivity.

Thanks man. I may look into it. I dont render much, but this might be a good option if I start to increase the amount I do. Doing stills is a non-issue with my box. I can process 35 stills in approx 10-15 min. If I do video though, I can see the need. I wish I could justify doing more rendering, but the challenge is for it to be worth my time to do them.... The prevalence of overseas 'cheap' rendering has spoiled a lot of people and the perceived value is not all that great on this (from what I have seen) .

Here is the finished product that I made from this rendering model. The video takes a while to render. This was almost a day and a half with a 3080ti

Always been the way I do it. Even in Lumion. Posted this a few days ago

I really dont render all that much. But every once in a while, I get a bug up my butt to mess around with it. I have a few high(er) end projects going and I think they are worthy of putting the time in. I have a pretty fast pc. i9 12900k 32gb 5200mhz mem 3080ti etc..... This took about 1 1/2 days to render at max settings. The client was not expecting this. I just promised them stills for Monday. I am curious to see what they think. Client is a builder and this is a spec home some hoping to secure future work if they feel this is worthy of marketing the home long before they dig dirt. Thank you! I looked and TM does not support multi-gpu , but might be interesting to just use a virtual 4090 machine just to not tie mine up. I might look into buying one if I do more rendering. I dont know if it is worth it though for me to take the time in doing the renderings. I know my son would love my 3080ti as a 'hand me down'. Then he could put his 3070 in our driving simulator!

Funny. I just posted a thread on if anyone is using any virtual computer/cloud rending. Running a rendering on a 3080ti which is going to take 2 days and looking for alternatives.

So I have been playing with more rendering lately. Mostly TM. I have essentially what is the fastest box one could build (before the 4090 cards came out). For RTX it is fantastic, but I am looking into rendering video. Even doing 30fpx with ray trace the times are days with 3080ti, I am doing about a minute of vid and it will run for 2 days to accomplish. (cant wait to see how it comes out). So I did a quick search on rendering farms where you rent a virtual computer. Found monthly, weekly and even hourly rentals. Equiv to to 10-1080 Ti cards running on some. So has anyone here ever used any? If so which might one recommend. I dont do enough of it to justify monthly or even weekly rental, so hourly would probably be best bet. Any thoughts?

Here is the end result. Have not tweeked my renders yet. This is first run at them.....No post processing, just strait out of first shot. The client wants all white also. Not my color choices. They have a decorator with some 'out there' ideas. When I add some lights and do some lower light shots, the design will really pop. I included one darker one I will light with good effect.

I export to TM with terrain. I use the terrain to cut in driveways, side walks, and even landscape beds. The TM paint on terrain does not give a good enough finished product for that. Export to a terrain that contains your drives, and walks, (and beds if you want them). Have the terrain slope off approx 24" at edges. Import into TM and blend terrain to meet up with it. This is a chief terrain blended with a larger area in TM The driveway is modeled in chief as is the underlying terrain. (drive set approx 3" higher than terrain for grass) You can do some cool things in TM to get more realistic ground look. Perfectly flat grass looks fake. See ripples down the side of the home in the ground. That is an intentional element meant to try to being in some more realism.