KirkClemons

Many of the siding materials in the Core Catalogs come with normal maps. You could use one of those, or at least use it as a reference for your own normal map.

A process for this is covered in this Knowledge base article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01142/creating-an-image-for-use-in-a-brochure-or-on-a-website.html

Maybe take a screenshot of what you see as well. I assume you tried maximizing and restoring down, your window to make sure it fits your current screen resolution before discounting that. If this is happening on multiple systems, I would assume you have similar/identical hardware on both systems, correct?

For future reference, in case anyone else has this problem: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00467/troubleshooting-missing-toolbars.html

I think this would make the approach much simpler. Once you have the angel right, all you need to do is customize the front objects and remove most of the shelves. You may need to use a separate base cabinet for the drawer base and a wall cabinet with an angled top with shelves above it.

Technically, it could be possible, but definitely not to scale. Since the photograph is not to real world scale you would have to eyeball it. One approach would be to import the photo as an 'Image'. Images in Chief Architect are objects that stand up on their own in 3D space, just like the plants. From there you would need to open a camera view and begin placing furniture in front of the image. Second option would be to place the image inside a room and give the room similar materials to that in the photograph. Then place objects in front of the photograph. All of this is assuming that the image is of an empty room of course, because you cannot interact with the elements in the photo. At the end of the day, it may be more efficient and will look better if you just draw the room, and begin placing materials, lights, and furnishings.

CrazyBump is a well known application that runs on PC or Mac, that helps automate the creation of Normal maps. It's fairly intuitive to use as it guides you through the process and provides a 3D preview so you can see the effect that your normal map will have on the model. http://crazybump.com/

Pro does have the ability to lock and unlock layers. But, any other Home Designer product doesn't not.

Quick clarification: They CAN open the file no matter what as long as they have the same build.(19). But, they will see this warning: So, you could send them the file. They can make notes with the text tools and measure things with the tape measure, then save it and send it back. But that's all. If you unlock it using the plan default option to allow editing, then they can make structural and design changes using their feature set. Another thing to think about too is that they can also just rent Chief X9 and make changes then cancel their rental. But, it's probably not likely to happen. Probably.

That's definitely a bump map on the texture. X7 didn't have the ability to show a bump map in standard camera views. X9 does. You said you checked 'materials' but did you check the material properties of the siding specifically?

The biggest danger I've seen with file locking is that the copy in the cloud becomes locked, and no one can open it, forcing the user into opening a previous version. The safest method is a check-in, check-out process. Most cloud-based file sharing services have some sort of revision history (example attached). The complexity come in when you start importing external files such as PDF's, and images for new materials. This is where the '3D> Materials> Create Plan Materials Library' can come in handy. You can update and re-export a plan specific library file so that anyone who is checking out the project can import the latest version of the library. In the end, it all comes down to communication between team members.

As of X9, this is still not a feature.

I don't have a microphone so it would be a video with captions if I can find the time to create one.

Are you looking for a pattern or texture? Or both?

Could be a browser issue. I generally use GIMP for all of my normal maps, but it seemed simpler to write the article using the online generator as installing the normal map plugin and working with layers seemed like it might be a little more complex than the majority of users would be willing to go. Maybe I'll write a second article or create a video some time showing the method I use all within GIMP. But, if you have access to Photoshop, then it is worth learning how to take advantage of it.

I published that up there so that I could share it here. Since it's not a Chief Architect operation I couldn't have our training staff write a Knowledge base article so I published one on my neocities account.

I published an article on how to do this using free software a while back as well: https://kcclemo.neocities.org/creating-height-and-normal-maps/

To backup what Bill is asking, what exactly is the process used to save a copy to the external drive? I would think using 'Save as' from chief, twice would accomplish what you are trying to do, but so would a simple file copy. Can't be sure without the exact wording of the error you are seeing though.

One thing I do to address the sunlight issue, is to turn off the sun, and then place some parallel light sources outside the structure with the following settings: Then, use Copy/Paste in Place as needed to increase the overall temperature. When using Ambient Occlusion in the ray trace settings, the program does a much better job of rendering this new "fake" sunlight more accurately.

No, I haven't been able to reproduce this at all on my end. I will try distribution regions and see if I have any luck.

Thank you! I will play around with different CAD blocks to try and reproduce this problem.

Quick clarification. The User Catalog is a database. The corrupt objects that are stored in this database, corrupt or otherwise, are all reindexed every time there is a change made to the database. This means that there are no 'files' to look for. All the data is embedded in a single database file. In support, we can typically try to manually open the database and delete the corrupt entry, but then we would recommend backing up and reimporting the User Catalog to try and purge any remnants of the corrupted object. Ideally, it would be helpful to narrow down why the corruption occurs on certain objects and find a way to prevent that from happening at all. Can any of you recall specifics about the corrupted object or what events you saw on the system, or in Chief prior to these objects becoming corrupt?