Chief_Trent

Hi Kevin. Yes, you can increase the brightness of your HDR backdrop by going into the rendering technique options in the Physically Based rendering technique and increasing the value of daytime or nighttime backdrop intensity (daytime for when the sun is turned on and nighttime for when it is off). The backdrop is used for lighting calculations in PBR, acting as emissive by default. Other rendering techniques do not support an emissive backdrop. Rene is correct here. The backdrop intensity is the only setting directly applied to backdrop lighting. In PBR with automatic exposure, turning up the brightness of the backdrop may not appear to make much of a difference in the lighting of the scene. This is because the perceived brightness of lights is relative to the brightness of other lights in how it is displayed on screen. For example, a room with a lamp might appear dark when viewed from outside, but then when moving the camera into the room, it appears to light up and the lamp seems much brighter. (The exposure adjusts automatically when entering a darker space). Similarly, the brightness of the sun or other light sources relative to your backdrop intensity will impact how much light seems to be coming from the backdrop. Therefore, turning the sun brightness down will make the backdrop seem brighter. If you want to get the most from your HDR backdrop, you can turn on the "Use Only Backdrop For Lighting" setting in the rendering technique options, which will essentially set the brightness of the sun to zero, so the majority of the light in the scene will come from the backdrop and it will appear brighter.

The exact numbers for that benchmark between the 4080 and 4090 are that the 4080 got 120.4 samples per second and the 4090 had 156.8 samples per second. To render the view with 500 samples, that is about 3 seconds for the 4090 verses about 4 seconds for the 4080. Roughly a 25% performance increase for the 4090 above the 4080 in this case. There is a difference between the two, but it is a much smaller difference compared to other graphics card options. For example a 4070 in that benchmark got 70 samples per second. (The testing benchmark was 500 samples in Chief Architect Premier X16 at the time of release using the “Nashville Kitchen”)

RayTrace is only run on the CPU so upgrading your graphics card won't impact performance in that rendering technique at all. For PBR, here is a graph comparing the performance of a bunch of different hardware including the 4080 and 4090. https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/computer-for-design-and-gaming/

Yes, like Rene was saying, you need to create an image where your tiles are offset in the picture and then import that into Chief. The pattern information you are editing only applies in vector view. If you look at the "White Tile" material in Chief you can get an idea of what I'm talking about (see attached images). The material in question has a source texture where one of the tiles is split in half so that when multiple copies of that texture are put next to each other in a grid, the edges will line up to create a seamless image. You can create an image like this in some kind of external image editing software like photoshop and then import it into Chief.

Hi Joe, The way we render backdrops in Chief is tied to the positioning of the camera and not related to the location of the model in the plan. Having your model near the origin or really far away won't impact how the backdrop looks behind it. Moving around the camera relative to the model will change the centering of the backdrop and zooming the camera in or out will change the scale of the backdrop in relation to the model. One tool which is helpful for positioning the background in your plan is the "Rotate Spherical Backdrop" tool, which can be found in the same tool palette as the "Cross Section Slider" (see attached image). This tool allows you to drag across the screen and adjust the horizontal rotation of your backdrop to get it to line up as desired. In terms of changing the perspective of the backdrop and maintaining an image that looks accurate, we don't have a way to do that in Chief as the perspective of a spherical backdrop is a result of the original image it comes from and where the camera was positioned within the environment when it took the picture(s) used for the backdrop. Yes, you can change the horizontal tile size to 2 to make the backdrop appear further away, as Steven mentioned, but doing so results in mapping a spherical image onto a hemisphere so it won't look completely correct.