TheKitchenAbode

The degree of the color cast is relative to the suns intensity, the more intense the greater the color cast. You can try lowering the suns intensity, might have to really drop it, best done with all other lights turned off so you are only seeing the suns effect. As the interior lights and sun work together you may need to also reduce the interior lights once you get the sun at the right level. Color cast can also come from other exterior materials, not just the backdrop. If the suns intensity is too high then that nice green lawn can cast a greenish color cast into the interior.

I believe about 4 or 6 months ago someone else posted a problem when driving an external monitor with their laptop. Their main screen was being driven by the discrete GPU but the external screen was being driven by the integrated chip. Not sure if it was ever resolved.

Just noticed that you have an external monitor. If so I assume you have it attached via the HDMI port. There are times on laptops where it will default to the integrated chip to drive the external monitor. Disconnect the external monitor and boot up your laptop, load CA and then check the CA preferences to see it now fully recognizes the GTX 960.

Did you also change the power settings in Windows?

Transitioning from RayTrace to PBR will take a bit of adjustment. Lighting and materials will show differently. The other major significance is that in PBR the sun contributes to the interior lighting while in RayTrace the sun does not. As such, in PBR the interior lighting effect is a combination of the interior light fixtures and the sun, finding the right balance can be challenging.

Mick is correct about how you update the drivers. When you use the update driver through the device manager Windows only looks for the last official Microsoft approved version. This often differs from the latest version offered by the hardware manufacturer, also most systems have support for drivers and this can also differ as some drivers may be customized for your laptop. If you get the driver from NVidia they do have an option to completely remove the old driver before installing the new one. Sometimes the standard update option will leave bits and pieces of the old driver on your system. The only disadvantage of doing a remove and install is that you will loose the option in device manger to roll back the driver in the event that the new driver causes problems, rare but it does happen.

Power plans tell windows how to control specific hardware such as the GPU to either minimize power consumption or ignore power usage and deliver maximum performance. The integrated GPU needs less power than the GTX 960 so if the power plan is set below maximum performance Windows will under certain circumstances use the integrated chip versus the GTX 960. There are two places for settings, under Windows, System there is the Windows one. Change it to high/maximum performance for both plugged in and battery mode. Then in the NVidia settings just scroll down the Global settings and you should see a performance settings, set this to max. There is also the same setting in the list where you added CA to the GTX 960, make sure it is also set to high/maximum. Reboot and see if this corrects your issue.

Just wondering if the power plans are all set to maximum/high performance in both windows and the NVidia settings.

The fact that you can open 1 or 2 views without any issues seems to indicate that the integrated chip can generate the views. Usually if the graphics chip/card is incompatible you can't even open 1 view without it crashing. The issue appears to be related to the number of active views it can handle at any given point in time. You indicate that it happens even if you close out an existing view in order to keep the active views below say 3, it is possible that when you close out a window that the data is not being flushed out of the graphics memory. It is also possible that for some reason there is an issue when the dedicated graphics memory becomes full that it is failing to swap properly with main system memory. Your integrated chip has 1.5 GB of dedicated memory so it would not take too many active windows to exceed this, it's not just the CA windows but also the windows in the background of any other active programs such as your browser, e-mail client, main OS window, etc.. They are all being held in the graphics memory so when you click on one of those programs they will respond instantly. I think it might be beneficial if you posted a plan that has this problem so we can see if it happens on all systems or is just related to your system.

Understand, fortunately I'm the boss so I get to decide. The downside is I don't have anyone to blame other than myself when something goes wrong.

Sorry, can't help when it comes to walkthroughs as I never do them.

Ok sounds like there are more than 1 light source. Open up the camera DBX and check to see how many active lights are permitted. This number should be greater than the total number of light sources in the plan. Set it at 100 and see if that helps.

Suggest you open up the light fixture DBX and under light data check to see whether there is more than one light source assigned to the fixture. Light bulbs are not light sources and there are fixtures in the library that only have one light source assigned even though the fixture has multiple light bulbs.

Pleased to have helped. Yes, I realized you still had work to do, just indicating that these openings can be problematic when rendering.

They are shadows from something, just open up your camera DBX and uncheck shadows, they disappear. I looked around your plan and there are many areas where there are major gaps in the ceilings and walls extending into the attic. This is most likely causing the problem.

I think the simplest solution is to use a soffit as suggested by Cheryl. Just make it 1/2" or 5/8" height to reflect the tile thickness. It automatically attaches to the underside of the ceiling and if you are putting in a recessed light the light will auto place properly. If the ceiling area to be tiled is not square or rectangular then a p-solid is easy to do and it can be adjusted to any desired shape.

I don't know what other things you have running but it does show that 6.7 GB of 8GB are being used, Memory will never show full 8GB usage, the system will start swapping to disk. For example on my laptop, with CA open, my browser and e-mail my main memory usage is 4.7GB. That leaves about 3GB for the graphics should it need it before it starts disk swapping. You might try closing all other non CA programs, check to see how much memory has been freed up and then try you camera views to see if you have gained improved stability. If so then memory is likely the issue.

Though my laptop is not a Mac it uses an Intel integrated graphics chip HD620, no problems with any of the camera views, just a bit slow with PBR but will do it. Your chip is newer so it should be able to handle everything. You might wish to google this with the Catalina OS, there have been some problems with this new version, not sure if they are graphics related. Have you checked the Iris Plus settings to make sure everything in there is set correctly, In CA preferences, does it recognize the chip and Open GL version. The only other thing I can think of is that you might be blowing the memory, 8 GB is borderline, the integrated chip has maybe 1GB dedicated, when this gets used up it will take main memory if available, if not it will start swapping with the disk. Disk swapping will work but things will slow down. However even with disk swapping there must be enough base memory to at least hold the entire contents of the active window being displayed.

It also made sense to me so I'm sticking with it until proven wrong. I think there are a lot of things in CA for whatever reason perform different than what one would expect. PDF importing is another one, I can do this in OneNote and everything is smooth, import into CA and things slow down real fast, I can also load Tab after Tab of PDF files in my browser and nothing slows down. If others can do it why can't CA.

Sounds like what happens when they do road maintenance on the highway and narrow it down from 6 lanes to one. If I can recall from past playing around I did notice that behavior, I believe that when the cursor is in a plan or camera view window the graphics processing is different than when the cursor is over the menu window area. I envisioned it as a window within a window, each are independent of the other and depending on the content type it can take more time for the GPU to regenerate that window.

Nice Blog article and well deserved Rene!!!

The problem is that CA sees some of those truss components as being outside of the room and is lighting them according to the sun, not the interior light. It's a problem with components that potentially penetrate the ceiling or wall finish. You could try moving them down slightly or reduce the sun intensity so it is more like the interior light levels.

Welcome to the world of "Light Bleed" with Raytrace. You need to put a roof on your structure, a foundation with a floor is also recommended.

The issue I have using the ambient occlusion is that it's global and when pushed too much it has other less desirable effects. Here is are a few examples if one uses an additional light source to control the shadows. In this interior PBR the main shadows are created by the ceiling recessed lights. These ones have 1 light source each with shadows turned on, intensity is 50 lumen. In this one I added an additional light source to each of the recessed lights, one with shadows turned on and the other with shadows turned off. To keep the overall light intensity the same each light source was set at 25 lumens, 2 X 25 Lumens = 50 Lumens To demonstrate further control, in this scene I adjusted the light sources intensity ratio to increase the shadow depth from the front of the room towards the staircase. This is most evident if you look at the shadow depth just below each of the three wall pics.

Good point Chris. I was focused on PBR'ing.