KirkClemons

If you enable outside lighting at all whether you build a roof or foundation will still produce the leaks. 

The problem is that the ray tracer is calculating the light's path's too accurately. The walls and cabinets have their geometry generated on the fly so what you are seeing is areas where two surfaces are not fully overlapping.

But Chiefer is right in that you don't need to use outside lighting for this scene.

For areas where two glass materials overlap you can try turning on caustics. This will tell the ray tracer to calculate light passing through transparent materials.

I use GIMP 2.8 with the National geographic plugin:

http://registry.gimp.org/node/9592

As well as the Beautify script set:

http://gimpscripts.com/2014/02/beautify/

Sometimes all it takes though is to apply an unsharp mask and increase the color saturation, depending on the image.

I suffered the absent User Catalogs frequently when changing computers - I run X6 on three computers and deactivate then activate my license from one to another. Usually on fresh statup, just after going through the activation dialog, my User Catalogs or even all the Catalogs would not list anything in the Library Browser.... it was a symptom of a deeper problem in X6...

 

I have lots of custom library symbols; many were created from 1999 onwards... some really old ones from CA 6 or 7 that had totally different ways of defining materials. Many materials were "pointing to" textures (bitmaps / jpegs) that are longer on my system. This was sort of accepted by Chief as being a lack with no great problems through to X5. X6 has problems. When importing a "legacy" library catalog it will advise that a texture cannot be found and provide the options to find or replace it or cancel to ignore. Cancel causes problems later. X6 will fail to export a catalog that contains items that do not have a matching texture. The whole catalog will fail to export if it contains missing texture paths. This was not a game stopper with X5. X6 stops dead... and this is a clue to the blank / missing catalog lists in the Library Browser.

 

It seems that on first load, X6 builds a thumbnail cache of texture images. If it cannot find a texture, it goes slow, or fails to show the catalog. This has caused slow X6 loads and missing catalogs on my computers. Only fix has been to check every legacy symbol I have for material assignments; fix where bad or missing; export the catalog; delete the loaded one, import the recent export. Very tedious and time consuming.... results: I can now reliably export my user catalogs in X6 and import them on other computers; and X6 startup is much faster.

 

To stretch my sense of humor: "jasper" is a Colorbond color that is a brown. When my Catalog textures got confused, a "jasper stone" color was linked instead... "jasper stone" is green. That was almost funny at the time.

This is different than the problem the OP was having. His items are completely gone which indicates a corrupt library file. Missing textures are generally a result of files being moved, renamed etc. Backing up your User Catalog periodically to a .calibz file can give you a way of restoring materials that are missing their textures as the calibz file contains copies of the textures when it is exported. Reimporting the calibz file extracts the textures to the User Data directory under the Textures folder in the form of a ZIP file.

We've tied this to dragging and dropping items from one folder to another in the Select Library Object dialog instead of the Library Browser as well as dragging and dropping items with special characters in the name such as '@', '#', etc.

They have since fixed the behavior for the special characters in update 16.2 and the dragging and dropping behavior has been restricted to the Library Browser so that you can no longer drag items while in the Select Library Object dialog.

This was added in update 16.3.

There is a chance that libraries that have been migrated forward are still exhibiting this behavior but over time we hope this issue will go away as the libraries are migrated and updated.

You're welcome to a couple of my favorites. 

grasses.calibz

Arial is a font family that comes with your system and is commonly found on both PC and Mac.

It has many variations so this can come into play when using different systems.

Chief Blueprint is a custom font owned by Chief Architect Software and is installed to your system when you install a Chief Architect or Home Designer program.

We have worked to make sure that the font renders the same on both PC and Mac.

Thank you for the examples.

And I see what Bryce means.

I didn't catch it before because I'm used to remapping textures and materials to models if they are exported out.

To see that Sketchup can retain this mapping though does seem to indicate a major difference in our exporters.

Thank you Jared and Glenn! I'm adding these to our database and we'll see if there is a commonality between these systems.

I just spoke with another user who has this same issue on their Windows 8 PC.

As far as I know the position of each window is written into a single .ini file.

This may indicate that for these systems, the sizes are not being written when the application quits.

Would it be possible for the people who have posted about this problem to export their system specs and attach them here please?

These articles explain how to do that:

http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01867/

http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-02846/

We are actually very neutral on this subject.

We recommend a gaming card from either AMD/ATI or NVIDIA.

Our system requirements page has some tips on purchasing a new computer that hightlights some of the things we recommend looking for:

http://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html

Workstation cards such as the Quadro series or the ATI Firepro series are optimized for generating CAD lines or making computations.

But they are weak when it comes to OpenGL support, the primary engine behind Chief Architect.

While it's true we have CAD tools they are probably the smallest part of the software and most designs will not contain the number of CAD lines that warrants a Quadro/Firepro type card.

The rest of the program uses OpenGL including dialogs with previews, and the Library Browser.

This page is kept up-to-date with the current 3D Mark rankings as well so that you can get a feel for which cards are doing well in the 3D realm and approximately what they cost:

PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmarks - High End Video Cards

It's looking great!

And yes we are using a completely new forum database and the old forum is locked.

This iteration we're trying to shift the focus from post count to post quality. You can still view how many posts a user has on this new forum but now you can award reputation points by clicking the green arrow to the lower right of a post.

This is a way to vote up the best answer to a question or thread so other readers know immediately which solution worked. Voting down should help discourage posting inappropriate or abusive posts.

Do you have an example of this?

I tried a couple of plans in Lumion free and couldn't see anything in the shading that seemed like it might be anything other than the rendering technique used by Lumion.

Also, textures seemed to map fine but in Lumion you need to import each material before it will be seen by the renderer.

Let's all compare preferences and procedures.

I cannot reproduce this on my Mac version 16.2.0.47OSX

I have tried moving the Library and Project browsers to new locations and clicking the red 'x' in the upper left corner to close the current window.

I have also tried quitting and re-launching and still they are right where I left them.

Here are my prefernces, I have Chief set to 'always' store the dialog size and positions:

http://i57.tinypic.com/4llrhu.jpg

Anyone with this problem have different builds of Chief, different preferences, or a different procedure?

You can get closer if you switch the map to satelite.

You're welcome, enjoy!

lol I'll go one step further and blow your mind a little more.

This web app let's you place GPS points on the map and download the GPS data to your computer as a GPX file.

It's GPX 1.0 but if you can find a GPX editor to do a Save as GPX 1.1 then you can import the data into Chief as elevation data and terrain perimeter:

http://gps.fuzzac.com/

Right-click any item or group of items> Export Library...

Textures:

http://www.deviantart.com/resources/textures/

http://texturer.com/

http://www.wildtextures.com/

http://www.burningwell.org/

http://imageafter.com/

Backdrops:

http://hdrmaps.com/

http://wallpaperscraft.com/

3D Symbols:

http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/3D-Models/free

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/

http://archive3d.net/

http://tf3dm.com/

For the sake of information which is what I think the OP is fishing for here.

You can decide on a limit based on the purpose for the image.

If you plan on using it for a small pamphlet or web page, then the most you may want is 500 passes as you can't really see any visual difference beyond this point when looking at the image on your monitor or small piece of paper.

If you intend to print on a larger sheet however, that is when more passes counts. but still, more than a 1,000 and your really just recalulating an image that is as good as it's going to get.

My preference is to set pretty much any image I create to 500 passes because here in tech I only ever need to put it in a tech tip article on the website. I'm not printing so it would be a waste of time to go much longer.

When I do let an image go all weekend it's usually for larger images that I want to have the flexibility to edit into a final image later.

I typically start mine on Friday evening before heading home and come back to stop it Monday morning.

That is how this ray tracer works. If set to unlimited time/passes, it will just keep recalculating the pixels and improving them.

The resulting image is usually around the same size whether it's a 1 pass rendering or 1,000 pass rendering. The size of the file is mostly based off of the resolution of the image.

Don't lose that image!

To use any external rendering/ray tracing program, you would need to export your drawing as a 3D Symbol/Model. *.3DS files work well.

Then import the file to the rendering program and setup lights, material definitions, etc.

Then you are ready for rendering.

As Dennis pointed out this involves a learning curve no matter what program you decide to go with and basically re-creating the scene and adjusting the lighting etc.

I checked on this and it can populate the page label, but not the number.

To print the page title:

Text Below Line needs to be set to “Automatic” in the camera callout
Send the camera view to your layout.
The layout page needs to have a page label specified in the Layout Page Information.  This page label is what will display in the second line of the camera callout.

Then this doesn't look like a feature of the software. The %page% macro reads the current layout page but doesn't work unless it is physically on the layout.

This would make a great feature request though!

This may not work because the camera is on the plan not the layout... but if you go to your callout defaults and set the default text below line to:

%page%

http://oi62.tinypic.com/2nljfd.jpg

Does it update to your layout correctly?

Hi thanks Glenn ....cos I didnt think of doing it that way    how is sydney today ?  my brother lives there.....

 

I think Kirk was confused since he gave us a board and batten wainscotting/room panelling , I just wanted a siding material ...chose it , click done....

That was just an example of the modling profile I had made. You can adjust the height and spacing in the molding specification to make it span the entire height of the wall if you need. My example was mainly showing that it doesn't handle the window very well. The pattern breaks up.