VisualDandD

Never had to use one before. But useful to know. Do these have supporting documentation which allows them to be installed in compliance with code.? Can't remember the exact verbage but often code will give a "or per manufacturer specs". Thanks in advance for the additional knowlege.

Michael Definitely not a pissing match, but it really is that easy. You can even see the upload dates on the videos to verify timeline. Dont get me wrong. I LOVE chief. I have been using since 97 Ver6 I think. And tools in general are only as good as you apply them (you are a great testament to that with your way of finding new ways to do stuff) Like I said....if one is making money with rendering, Lumion is a no-brainer. But that is not the base of my work. My clients are happy with WC and Line which I use liberally! I love it for the ability to produce the design intent without getting caught up in the little things. Chief makes that seamless for me. I could care less about the new PBR.... I want Chief to be more efficient on Construction drawings personally. Always appreciate your view points. I love the way you dive into some of the things in Chief. Cool to see the way other users solve problems.

Ok, This might help. Here is a sequence of my first month with Lumion. This is the first thing I tired to do in lumion.(day 2) Beyond the first few times of opening and just playing around. Remember this is an older version and new reflective settings would have really made this jump. This was my second attempt at something. Day 4 (still had not played with the lumion materials settings hence the bad stainless) O did start to play with reflection planes. This was two days later. Newer version do that almost auto now. This is what I was generating for builders as they wanted more watered down versions. (this is day 5) This is day 10. Learning how to import good earth and terrain into chief and then render in lumion. This is month in. I did this vid with all the rendering coming from Lumion. Modeled all the thing in chief, even builders logo you see in title screen. Not bad for something I was just playing with in my spare time......

it was pretty easy first time I used it frankly. I was shocked at how easy it was. It is expensive and their upgrades are nuts. 1000euros for one version behind and almost full cost for 2 versions. If photorealistic was a big part of what I did, I would make the leap in a second. I find that for what i do, Chief WC with line drawings work AWESOME. I wish I could find clients who wanted to pay a good amount for better 3d but that is not what I find. I am pretty busy doing plan work, and it would be hard to justify pulling off that to do work that effectively did not make as much. I while Lumion is very fast, (as fast as I can picture anything could be), it still does take the time to be picky and get the whole scene set up. It takes a long time "decorating" a model to where when you go photo realistic, it looks nice. The better the quality of the image, and then you are worried about things that would never show on a lower quality render. This is off topic, but 3d rendering in general....There seems to be people in the rendering business who I could probably pay to do it rather then justify my time screwing around getting a perfect looking scene. Dont get me wrong, I LOVE playing with it and generating the images....but for what the market will pay for it, I think I am better off just drawing plans. Lately I have been providing my builders with the ability to work direct with their clients. I create sketchup models and stylize them and set up scenes for my builders. I have them buy a 3d mouse and they have instant presentations! That way they give off the impression of being more a "design build". I let the builder handle all the headache of dealing with the client, and I get a very streamlined process which goes about 4 times faster. (and I dont have to meet them). I still have individual clients, but they take MUCH more hand holding, and my bread and butter are smaller builders doing 10-15/ year without in-house design. Anyway....I cant get any of them to bite off on paying me to do the really good looking stuff. Of course they would love it if I offered to do it for a small amount of money...But I cant justify doing it on the cheap....

Lumion is very easy and quick. I am still running 6. Not sure if upgrade is in order as 95% of the stuff I do actually I 'dumb down" the final product. Here are a few renders with only chief materials and modified in Lumion. Very little lumion time. All edits can be seen in real time so light adjustments are super easy. Movies were not even done on best resolution. Took about 10min to render. Wish I could justify upgrading to the latest. Still on fence since I rarely get anyone who wants more than my typical chief WC and line stuff. Most builders only want black and white too as clients are hard to keep focused. Id say the render was pretty good. Fin product below

Agree completely. I do wish there were a short cut to select a wall and just switch all materials to default. (rather than having to open a few more DBX's) Something I use, is I make all my initial drawings in lower detail to keep client focused on the mass and shapes at first. I go into my wall dbx and change wall material to a custom material which looks like graph paper. Then, when we get further along, I change the walls to appropriate type. Very easy from the wall definition panel. I then add accent walls and siding changes as necessary.

Yes you can. Just go to chief icon. RIGHT click. Hold 'ctrl' and hit 'open'. Another separate chief application will open. I have done this to copy from one layout to another some items. My suggestion is though that this is finicky. I NEVER save the one I have copied from and close it down before continuing work in the other layout. That said, for some instances I have found it works just fine.

Very nice guys! I have recently starting doing pool designs working with a pool contractor I have known for a while. I have done it several ways but went back to using molding poly lines after I realized even the industry standard design tools like "Pool Studio" dont accurately model the bottom transitions. I have done that in chief using terrain along with roads and curbs....but it is overkill and poly lines are easier to work. Thanks for the tips given here....that will help a ton in workflow. Here is a recent project all done in chief (modeled in lumion). The design is actually a remodel. The lower half of the pool already exists and we are adding spa/slide beach entry area. I enjoy pushing the limits of what I can do in chief. BTW....the slide is actually a staircase. I just am only showing the "handrail" which I made a custom molding profile for the slide and altered my rise and run to get desired effect. Wish we had a better 3d molding polyline that would extrude x,y,z but you can still do things....just takes a little head scratching. [video]

Mike Hey its Justin from Charlotte. You have several options. The elevations can be "live" which will send just how you have them and update as you make changes. For that you can just turn off color with the color/bw toggle. Or, you can send elevations as plot lines. (this is what I do). You have to manually update with this method, but it allows you to clean up any unwanted lines and even fudge a few things in CAD if need be. You can also tone down your pattern colors easily without messing with the layers...etc. Hope that helps

Thanks guys. The terrain is just standard modeled. The prop lines and set back are sidewalks (used for 3d visual purposes) The transparency setting and can be used to make all the grids. Just the stock black tile patter with whit joints. Resized, and applied to a CAD poly line solid in the first vid to figure out best initial placement. This works really easily and can result in some surprises. There are times I have found a much better overall solution when looking at it this way vs a story pole and laser on site. In fact, I now will only work this way when I have to set a critical elevation. Our surveyor charges aprox 600-800 for a topo. Cheap considering each foot of foundation is a few grand not couting veneer material. Setting a home right from the get go it a HUGE step.

I use chief all the time for this kind of stuff. I make models all the time for ideal lot placement. Typically on lake lots with heavy topo and involving basement / stem wall foundation construction. You can do some amazing things with Chief,....just have to think outside the box a little sometimes. I do cut/balance calcs as well. Not too hard at all! Here is a recent example. (skip to 1:30 in first vid for the "3d" example) This lot had 22' of fall across bld envelope. (I am talking the client and owners in the video...but you get the idea) @ 7:20 I go into driveway..etc. Second vid the foundation "design" suitable for cost estimating. (after optimized) Cool part at 2:45 where you can really see what you are planning foundation wise. Second vid is the foundation design (so we can do a rough cost estimate) It will be engineered at a later date but done enough of them to cost it from this model.

Export DAE and import said file into lumion.

OK siding is right from chief as is tile. I remember scrolling for ones that would render well. I bumped up the resolution to 3500xsomething....just to sharpen. Steeings are below. Photon mapping on, no compute caustics. I adjusted image slightly brightness/contrast when I was done using the settings right in Chief. I was using x9 and just cheated by using the actual texture as the bump map. While I can make "real" bump maps, it actually gave a nice desired effect to just copy image file right into the bump map. I did the same with the tile. I have played with "cheating" and using the same for normal maps but it often distorts too much. I have used Crazy Bump in the past but as I said, this was all in chief and I was not wanting to waste bunch of time going crazy on it. I ran a few low res to tweak my lighting levels, and then I ran it overnight. Dont remember how many passes....just shut it off after about a 8 hour run. The model it is from is HUGE, so the render time was long even with a fast computer. If I were trying to go quicker I would have "save as" the file and chopped the model down to just what I was rendering. Thats it...no magic. I also attached a VERY ROUGH exterior one I did using the same "bump" techniques on the stone and siding. Very very rough, but I could see it would have potential. For the glass, I use a picture of trees to "paint" the glass and then set transparency. Makes a nice effect and much more realistic. I dont have to worry about rendering now....it is becoming real!

Nope....wood and tile right out of chief. Just had to search for good ones :-). Im on my phone so I can't look now. Nothing special about it just have to be selective about materials. That is 1/3 the battle. Next is well placed light's and last 1/3 is settings. I spend almost no time playing with chief rendering as I use outside stuff most times and even then it is just for fun. The last two were my attempts to see what chief could do if I put some effort into it. The first two have obvious things missing. If I get a chance, I'll pull that file. I think I saved the camera and settings.

I dont ray trace much except playing around. I never fully detailed these, but was rather just having fun. The last few, I started taking further in detail. The last one of the tub, and shower. I pulled actual Kohler product off 3dWharehouse. They rendered nicely.

Yep....my biggest gripe with stairs is where they have to go from inside to outside of a wall. The winder tool is just WAY too finiky. Sometimes it displays right in 2d and not 3d and at other times the other way around. If you use "landings" to make the transition, they skirt board breaks and does not look right as does the handrail. It is a major pain and getting stairs RIGHT can take way more time than worth. I will often just draw 2d cad to show it if I can get away with it.

I think the above comment is spot on. While some of the "features" may not seem like big deals, heck...program functionality is most important to guys using the software to work daily. Even just the improvement in undo-redo, would be a BIG one for me. While not looking "sexy" on paper, a revamp of internal program optimization would be well worth it even if there were no "flashy" new gizmos. Think about the 1000's of pauses every day we wait on (even with very fast computers). If they start optimizing what they already have, that sounds pretty good to me. I agree on stairs....and am always hopeful. Wish they could be edited like roof planes (to break them and move the treads in and out instead of trying to get the fussy winders to work with invisible walls and room dividers) I am hopeful...and fingers crossed.

I found that if I got the vantage point I wanted (which is putting the camera way back), I could send the vector view to layout UNCHECKING the line scaling box. Then I could enlarge it on the layout page and all the shadows would scale properly with the image on a editable line drawing. For some reason, using the magnifying glass "zoom" tool messes up the shadows on an vector drawing. (have not tried it on others). It appears as if the shadows stay the same size as the image before you "zoom in" and the main part you zoom on, gets bigger with the shadows being left small....(if that makes any sense.)

Love the new shadows on elevations. But since release I have seen them act quirky for me . I could never figure out what caused it. I finally have it figured out (and hope they can fix it as well). I like to send elevations to plans as plot lines and then I change the pattern lines to a lighter shade of grey. This does not exhibit these quirks when you use live views. (but with live views, you cant do the pattern line color changes either)..... So the "problem" comes from how Chief now "zooms". The zoom wheel, used to change field of view. With the launch of 3d mouse support, I believe this changed. Now when you "zoom" the camera just moves in and out. So when making a perspective shot for a cover page, I did not always like the extreme amount of perspective that being so close to the model gave. I would set the camera back further, and realized you could use the manual "zoom" on the tool bar to "zoom in" without changing perspective of the drawing. I imagine this is just "cropping" somehow. Anyway....that is what causes the shadows to map improperly. Finally figured it out. I then went into the camera to see if I could just manually adjust fov and I did not see any options there. I thought I remember there being some in older versions. Anyway....that is where there is a glitch in the shadows. If you just take the camera from far back (and dont "zoom in") and send as plot lines, when you blow it up on the plan, it looks all fuzzy. (but at least shadows are in the right spot). I need to send this one in. See pic. The lower one is a camera taken further back for less perspective distortion and then manually "zoomed" in using magnifying glass icon.

Yes, use annosets. One trick though, is you cant use "Rich text". It wont reformat when you change text style, but normal text does. I have finally started using this and dropped almost all my rich text usage for this reason. (except in certain cases). Make sure you have things set to change "by layer" so you can easily change text styles and get the desired result.

Wish the "old" site was more easily available...... Looks like lots of great info. The only thing more rewarding about drawing stuff, is getting to build it too! Now I building this one.....

Exactly. The answer to the Op would probably have been better stated that your best option would be to have the plans engineered by a licensed PE. They then seal the drawings and no architect required. I have worked with some that do it several ways. Some annotate my plans by hand and I transcribe their notes and then they seal my drawings. Others make their own drawings as "S" pages and seal those and the "A's" require no seal.

Why not try the new user account first? MUCH easier and you can do in 5 minutes. Your issue is not a chief one. It is your PC. As frustrated as you are, misdirecting it to Chief is silly. WHEN you get it fixed, it will be the same version of Chief running just fine on your computer. I've been there. Try the new account first.

Andy I had a similar issue which I thought was tied to the move to X8. Tech support tried very hard to help, but could not track way. I started examining crash reports under the "Event viewer". With some googling, I found that I had a few corrupted files within windows somehow that were causing this. I saw other people with graphical type programs were experiencing similar crashes with similar corrupt files. I tried manually deleting and reloading these files from a command prompt but it was not working.... Faced with the option to have to do a clean install, I thought of something MUCH simpler to try. I created a new user account. Chief was already installed of course so I copied over a few plan files and after a few days, I realized I had no crashes. (and this was coming from 2-3 a day!) So, it was VERY easy to just copy all my "User" directories over and I just killed off the old account. Problem solved and never looked back. Should be something easy for you to try. Worked for me.

Joe Thanks for the tip. It is funny, I have never needed this, and then the other day, I ran into a situation where this detail might be needed in a garage (to elevate the slab enough on a crawl to have only one step). I was not going to fully detail the area, but heck...that is so easy, I think I will. It is a good exercise anyway. Thanks so much for sharing!