KirkClemons

Well, to muddy the waters a little more, in my experience I receive fewer video card-related calls on NVIDIA Geforce than I do on ATI Radeon. My personal recommendation is to find any card where the second number in the model number is a 6 or higher. The 6 cards are all in their high-performance gaming line. You can see from this graph that most of the Geforce *60 cards rank pretty high in comparison to other cards out there:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

I would avoid Quadro and FirePro lines though as they are not optimized for gaming. They are engineered with computation in mind. The high-end models seem to work most of the time but it's hit or miss. If 3D modeling and rendering are your primary focus, stick with a gaming card from the Geforce or Radeon lines.

This will always be one of those topics that come up as software advances.

The best advice I can give for the long term is to keep your purpose for your computer in mind when deciding which one to buy. We are accustom to walking into a retail store and just buying something off the shelf but, you can usually find comparable prices for better systems online.

For example, I found my HP laptop during cyber Monday for less than $500. It came with a 1GB gaming card and has been running Chief without a problem since version X3. I'm sure I'll reach a limit at some point but 5yrs. is not a bad return for the price.

I'm a hobbyist Blender user and one of my favorite instructors has launched his new texture website:

https://poliigon.com/

Thought it might prove useful since all of these are seamless and ready to import as a new material in Chief.

Also, they all have an optional 'displacement' map which is perfect for using as a bump map in Chief, you would just need to invert them in most cases to get the right effect.

Hope you find it useful.

Unfortunately, this is just not possible right now.

You are able to redirect the User data folder, and the Undo and Temp folders.

But you are not able to redirect program data. It's hard coded into the software.

Kirk I am having the same issue and have a brand new Mac desktop running Yosemite 10.11.3 Any help would be appreciated!

To fix permissions:

- Uninstall Chief:

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18752

- In a new 'Finder' window, select 'Go> Applications' from the menu.

- Open the 'Utilities' folder.

- Open the 'Disk Utility' app.

- Select your primary disk from the list on the left.

- Click 'Verify Disk Permissions'.

- When the verification is complete it will either report that everything is OK or it will list all the permission issues that it found.

- To repair any issues it found, click on the 'Repair Disk permissions' button.

- Restart your system, (Apple menu> Restart)

- Reinstall Chief.

There are already macros in Chief to pull and print this information, you just need to add the information to the project:

This video demonstrates what everyone is referring to in case you need a visual demonstration:

https://video.chiefarchitect.com/?autoplay=10119

This is common for X1 on newer operating systems. Which version of Windows are you running?

Material region polylines can help here. The cross sections can be one material region, or a combination of regions. The large squares would be separate material regions.

But they've all got that. I'm just after a wider variety of plant images. If I put up a post on this forum saying like "can anyone send a copy of the bonus catalogue to ed.209@hotmail.com please" would that breach any of the rules?

Yes, it would since these catalogs are only available to SSA subscribers or people who paid for them. Not all of them are SSA only:

Then that is not a free catalog. If you see 'SSA' across the catalog image, it's not free.

Then you probably never had the bonus or manufacturer catalogs that required SSA. You can still download any or all of the Free catalogs on that page though.

https://3dlibrary.chiefarchitect.com/

Then you can press Windows Key + R on the keyboard.

In the Run dialog type:

%programdata%

Click OK and you should see a folder for your version of Chief Architect.

In that folder you want to copy the Core Libraries, Bonus Libraries, Manufacturer Libraries, and Referenced Files folders to get all of your Chief Architect Content.

To copy your User Catalog to another system you will want to export it out to a .calibz file and then import it into Chief Architect.

Are you running Windows or Mac?

It's part of the status bar.

If you've somehow hidden the status bar below the bottom of your screen or disabled it in 'Edit> Preferences> Appearance', then you won't be able to see the ray trace progress.

It is looking so much better! But I'm not sure why my lights are so bright...

That's due to the change made to the offset and the material being set to translucent. Are those actually supposed to be open bottom pendant lights? I must have missed that while making changes.

Yes, I believe I used a new offset of 30" to put it near where you should see a light bulb.

Forgot to mention in my first post as well, I modified the ray trace settings as well, be sure to poke around in there to see the changes.

You're welcome, feel free to share your results if you feel inclined.

I don't have any of your custom textures so the scene looks a little different.

But what I found in your plan is that you had specularity or reflective properties applied to nearly every material in the scene.

Also, you had more light sources than was necessary and they were very intense.

This was probably adding up to your results.

As already mentioned, in another reply, the video card is not used while ray tracing so I wouldn't stress over that.

Instead I would focus on adjusting your material definitions and limiting your lights to a more real setup.

I've attached a modified version of your plan along with my results with only 5 passes.

Changes made:

- Turned off all the lights in the plan on every floor and deleted the extra light sources that were added. But left the lights in front of the camera on.

- Adjusted the intensity of the lights that were left on.

- Adjusted the material properties throughout the room to better fit the objects they are applied to.

- Moved the light source for the pendant lights into the pendant instead of underneath.

modified-plan.zip

I can't see any objects in the plan that would need caustics so you could turn off compute caustics, that's the biggest contributor to 'fire flies' in a render.

If you need to use caustics my minimum recommendation is to let it complete 500 passes. That's the number I've found works for any scene that uses caustics.

I like this idea.

All this snow and ice got me thinking that we need some frost and frosted glass materials.

You can download the stock textures as a ZIP file from my gallery here:

http://fav.me/d9mu6zz

Or I've attached a Chief Architect X7 CALIBZ file below.

Enjoy!

frosted-glass.calibz

I don't know about the practical side of things but as a tech support analyst, I get a lot of calls and questions about how to make a rendering look better for both home designer and chief users.

So it is a hot topic and I would imagine that clients are asking for this or designers are trying up their game and provide better eye candy for their clients.