KirkClemons

Time-saving tips: Keep in mind that these tips help save time, but there are more advanced things you can do to improve the final quality of your image that would counteract these time-saving methods. But in most cases, some of these are appropriate because you don't want to spend processing power on what you are not showing in the image. 1. Caustics are a heavy hitter when it comes to overall ray trace time. I generally don't turn these on unless there is glass in the scene that will be catching the light. Adding caustic effects will add a little more realism but sacrifice time. One caveat, the windows in Chief Architect don't count. When Chief creates the sunlight effect through the windows, it is doing so without caustics. So, if you are rendering a scene that doesn't have any additional glass such as, glass shower walls, vases, etc. There is no need to turn on the 'Compute Caustics' option. 2. Limit the number of light sources you use when possible. Lights can add a great deal of time to a render and in many cases don't add to the scene. An example would be, a daytime exterior scene. You don't need all the lights inside and outside of the house to be on. It generally takes away from the realism and just looks 'off' to the eye in most cases. The sun is shining bright and the details of the house are clearly visible, so you don't need all those extra lights taking up processing time to achieve a nice looking result. This is completely subjective of course, you should do what you think look best, for example, if a covered patio is being shaded by the sun, then turning on the porch lights may look nicer than a completely dark area. For example(Settings attached in 3040-Settings.zip): Also, don't turn on lights that don't directly add to the result you are going for. This is where experimentation comes in, Try a quick low-quality low resolution render to see how the lights are affecting the scene, and turn off any that don't add any real impact or don't produce the result you are looking for. Just because a light fixture is visible, doesn't mean that it must be turned on. It's OK to use just natural light. For example(Settings attached in 747-Settings.zip): 3. For Interior scenes, you don't generally need to keep the rest of the building. If I'm rendering a bedroom, I typically stand the camera at the door looking in, so I don't need to keep the hallway or the other rooms in the house. For example(Settings attached in 607-Settings.zip): Hope these are helpful to you all, I love seeing threads like this getting started by users and discussed by users. It's the best way to learn. P.S. Don't under-value the art of post processing. or bringing in outside symbols and textures. But perhaps that is better done on a separate thread. 3040-Settings.zip 607-Settings.zip 747-Settings.zip

Yes, the O.P. shared a screen shot of his File Explorer and he is using Dropbox

One quick note about the Auto Save feature, this feature doesn't save your work like google docs would, where it's a true save of the original file. The autosave file is only kept around if there is a Chief Architect generated error message. If there is a hard program crash the autosave may never have the chance to be written to disk. I would recommend changing your auto archive interval to hourly rather than previous save unless you are in the habit of manually saving often. Also, I see that you are working from a Dropbox location. Do you see any different behavior if you work from another location that isn't being accessed by the dropbox application continuously?

Yes they are.

We have examples on the info page: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/360-panorama-viewer/

It's available from all rendering techniques except for Painting, Watercolor, and Line Drawing. See my 'Step-by-step' posted earlier in this thread.

I have not tried to implement this on a website yet. (Basically, I don't have one) But according to their documentation, you would need to configure some JavaScript at the bottom of the page. See this example from their site: https://pannellum.org/documentation/examples/tour/ Particularly the 'hotspots' setting in that code is what seems to allow you to determine the location and target of a hotspot.

No, that is just what you need to do if you don't want to use the Chief Architect branded viewer on your site. We are working on implementing an [Embed] function which will more than likely be available sometime during the transition from beta to the final release of X9. So once that is all finished, you will have a quick and simple option of embedding a 360° Panorama or 3D Viewer model in your website using our branded player, or if you want to remove the Chief Architect logo and just display a generic player, or possibly add your own brand, you need to export the models to their own files and upload them to your website and utilize a player of your choosing. Basically to sum up, if you are technical enough or have a person who is, you can upload the files externally. Or if you would rather take the easy route, you can use our viewer which has our logo on it but is up and running quickly and is hosted on our site.

The Chief Architect viewer will always be embedded and hosted from chiefarchitect.com, but it's the easiest way to implement a 360 image. You can always save the panorama to a separate file and use another viewer of your choice. Under the hood, many of them use either of these two open source versions so you can probably take your pick or just implement the core viewer yourself: https://pannellum.org/ https://developers.google.com/vr/concepts/vrview

The step-by-step: Open a full camera somewhere in your model. Select 3D> Camera View Options from the menu and turn on any features you want to see(edge smoothing while idle, shadows, reflections, etc.) Select File> Export> Export 360° Panorama. Select a Width, Height, and whether or not to save to the cloud or to your hard drive. If you choose the cloud, you will be prompted to enter your login credentials for your Chief Architect account. * If you want to export a ray traced view, you need to choose 360 panorama from the ray trace options. Once the export is finished, you can visit your online account to preview or share the panorama which can be viewed in any browser: https://accounts.chiefarchitect.com/360/914375142142347

This can be caused by walls that are out of alignment, or walls that are at different angles.(e.g. the first-floor wall is .025° while the foundation wall is at 0°) Check the angles of the walls that are giving you trouble, and then check that they are aligned across floors.

Once the camera view is open select 3D> Camera View Options> Perspective Crop Mode. This will restrict the clipping plane to just the view port. I used the predefined material type of 'Transparent' and set the Index of refraction to Crown Glass.

Here's an example of using caustics: whiskey.bmp 100 passes took 40min. test-render.zip

I typically need to run a ray trace for close to 100 passes or more when using caustics. It will eventually clear up it's just an expensive process.

This article should help with the general process: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01029/creating-stairs-with-a-cable-stair-rail.html

You can change the default directory, it shouldn't be a problem. Just do the following: - Close or quit Chief. - Copy your 'Documents\Chief Architect Premier XX Data' directory to your secondary drive.(preferably somewhere near the root to avoid long path names.) - Open Chief and set the preference that Perry pointed out. - Re-launch Chief.

Also, double-check that you are using the texture size, not the pattern size. A common mistake is to define the material type and expect the texture to scale with the pattern.

I decided to research the physically accurate colors of different types of metals and create a library of them for ray tracing. These metals have the rgb values for a more accurate reflection color. You can adjust the roughness or apply bump maps to achieve varying textures. Hope they are useful. Metallic Base Colors.calibz

The Online Support Center does not currently have a file size limit. We do recommend compressing the plans into a ZIP file to help cut down on the upload time, but it's not required and you should be able to upload any file size provided your internet connection doesn't time out for any reason.

Just run the installer for Xvid and then restart Chief Architect. The Xvid codec should be available under preferences after that. https://www.xvid.com/download/