KirkClemons

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.

Legacy Shadows uses the slower method of drawing shadows that the software use to use. In X5 or X6 we developed a new faster shadows feature that allowed users to keep shadows on all the time with very little hit to performance. The trade off is that the shadows are not as accurate. You can try checking the Hardware Edge Smoothing option to see what you are using. In Rashid's post he had it set to 8xMSAA.

Ray tracing isn't done on the video card so generally, if you are seeing a problem in a ray trace, then it's an issue with the plan. Use backup entire plan to backup the plan and all related textures and upload it here so we can take a look.

NVIDIA uses an "Optimus" driver to manage switchable graphics. You can configure this to use a specific card when Chief Architect is launched: http://www.howtogeek.com/136123/htg-explains-what-you-need-to-know-about-nvidia-optimus/

If you draw a 3D box using the primitives menu, then select the box and click the 'Explode Shape' button, it explodes the box into 6 separate faces that can all have different materials applied.

On another note you can also break those PDF's using free online tools and access the data anyways. Or open the PDF and reproduce the drawing by hand. Either way Kevin is right, if someone has a mind to steal your work, a 'read only' attribute isn't going to stop them. Best you can do is be proactive like Joe said.

At the same time, it's usually easy enough to reproduce a drawing based on images. They wouldn't need to access the original project file. If your dimensions and notes are all in a PDF that you send to the client they could just as easily forward that on to someone else who maybe underbid you. This seems more like a matter of contract. But I'm not a lawyer so there may be ways around these things even if you have an agreement with the client in writing that they will not share your plans with competitors.

How do you typically create new layouts and update your template? There seems to be a lot of older data from X6 and maybe older in this file. There are even references to objects that would normally be in a plan file, not a layout file. This is probably what's adding to your file size. I would recommend copying your title block into a new layout and saving the new layout file as a template.

I uploaded just the basic textures to that post. You can download the textures and make a new material in your User Catalog with them.

Critical error writing to preferences is generally a permissions issue on the Mac's drive. What version of OS X are you running?

You can select Launch Assistant to setup a new ray trace profile. This is plan specific but you can have multiple profiles in one plan. You would want to setup these profiles in your template if you want them inherited by any new plans that you start in the future.

Sounds like you have textures toggled off under 3D> Camera View Options> Toggle Textures.

In general the larger processors are going to be faster even though they may sometimes report lower frequencies. For example: A 6-core even running at 1.2GHz would probably still beat out a quad core running at 2.8GHz. This is because it has more bandwidth to process tasks with than the quad core. That being said, it is not quantifiable unfortunately, but there is a definite difference. There are too many variables to consider with every scene, but as an example, The same scene using the same ray trace settings took 4 days on my laptop which was using an intel i5(2-Cores at 2.3GHz) to complete the 500 passes that I set it for. On my desktop using an i7(4-cores at 1.7GHz) it took 24hrs.

Well, unfortunately the ray tracer does not support rendering on the graphics card at this point. It's all done on the processor. The faster the processor the faster the render speed. But playing with lighting and setup can help as well.

Hirnsausen The steps have already been written down for most of these. You are dealing with some pretty advanced features when you start talking about resizing and modifying a symbol but maybe the online documentation will help: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00117/importing-a-3d-symbol-from-an-outside-source.html http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00809/converting-an-object-into-a-symbol.html http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01192/creating-a-custom-cabinet-symbol.html http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01808/creating-a-custom-door-symbol.html These articles all touch on different aspects of importing objects into the library as usable symbols.

In the screen shot you sent 'Enable Depth of field'(focal blur) and 'Compute Caustics' were checked. Are you saying you already tried unchecking those? What does the new image look like?

Try disabling focal blur, and compute caustics.

In the future, this article covers the steps you can take to restore them as well: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00467/troubleshooting-missing-toolbars.html

Would you mind attaching an example of the image you are unhappy with please? And maybe a plan as well?

The Catalogs Jon is referring to can be found here: http://3dlibrary.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?r=site/detail/932 http://3dlibrary.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?r=site/detail/971

Actually as an after thought, you could probably use an all caps font instead of a regular font.

This is unfortunately a Mac thing. Apple assumes that a word spelled in all caps is an acronym and therefore should be ignored. You see the same behavior in any application on the Mac. There is no option for it either, spellcheck settings are under 'System Preferences> Keyboard> Text'. You can change your language and choose whether to correct spelling automatically or not and that's all.

During import, the PDF is converted to an image. That means you go from vector lines which scale as the screen size changes and remain crisp and clear(just like a floor plan view in Chief) to an image with static pixels that remain the same and give that grainy effect when zoomed or scaled. Depending on how the PDF was created I've had some luck converting it to a DXF file that can then be imported. This retains the vector lines so that it can be scaled more accurately.

You can create a copy of the material, one that is rotated to the angle you need. http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01006/customizing-a-library-material.html

Esc key doesn't work for me either. But Ctrl+W does. Then you click Yes to interrupt the ray trace.