TheKitchenAbode

2 minutes ago, Doug_N said:

I am planning a vacation and will be out of touch, both by internet and by cell for a few days at a time, and would like to work on various projects.  Tethering by cell phone is how I will forward work in progress to clients, but, well you know what I am saying. 

I would talk to CA Support, I'm certain they can accommodate for this. Not really a vacation though!!!

1 minute ago, Doug_N said:

This brings up an interesting question.  Can you go offline for a significant length of time and still have CA working?

If you talk with CA support I'm sure they can arrange for this. I know on my system(s) it checks in at least once a day. You can always tether via your cell phones data connection if need be.

1 minute ago, HumbleChief said:

Thanks Graham and I've learned over the years to keep my expectations low and am under no illusion that a new 4.0 SSD will have a noticeable effect. The challenge now is that my 1 TB 2.5" SSD is almost full and need more storage. Not today, but soon and am watching NVMe drive prices for a deal. both 3.0 and 4.0 PCIe. Will do nothing for as long as possible as that always been smart in PC world.

 

I'm only mildly curious about a RAM drive and the first thing I read said be wary of them for various reasons. May explore but usually find my time better spent  at other tasks. Do you have a RAM drive? They seem risky but am quite ignorant about such things...will research.

I don't run with a Ram Drive but have set one up just to see. I myself could not detect any difference however that may be related to the type of work that I do. I believe Rene derives a true benefit as he seems to be using numerous custom high resolution textures and some very complex models/symbols, due to their size their load times will be much greater than CA's included textures and symbols so a Ram Drive will get this done as fast as possible.

What you need really depends on what you do, and that varies for every user.

11 hours ago, HumbleChief said:

BBQ'S WITH CPU USEAGE. This might interest you Mark. The hardware monitor is with Ryzen's PBO single thread settings. You can see the CPU hit a high of 4591 and it uses 100% CPU to render that camera view. Interesting.

The high CPU core usage is due to the fact that the BBQ's are symbols and the majority of work is related to the textures, this is a multi threaded process so your high core count 3900X and it's ability to run those cores at a high frequency provides a considerable benefit. On the parade of homes you can also see this if you watch task manger, however due to the model rebuilding which is primarily single threaded the benefit is not as great as texture processing here only represents maybe 10% of the overall processing time.

IMO you've done a great job in putting together your new system and doing so without breaking the bank. Personally, though you are considering other possible future upgrades I would be very cautious not to set to high of expectations as to how great a performance benefit will be gained over what you currently have. Certainly switching to a MVNe M.2 drive will help and given their low cost they are very good value for the money. Before coughing up the big bucks for one of those newer drives I would do as Rene suggest and just set-up a Ram Drive, you have enough memory, it costs nothing to do and it will be faster than any other drive system. Also, setting up a Ram Drive is a good way to test/predict the potential performance improvement before spending any more money. If you set one up and can't really tell the difference then it's telling you that the type of work you do will not really benefit from these new drives.

22 hours ago, dskogg said:

Hi everyone, i was going to record my screen with the task manager on top but it wouldnt work on my large monitor so i switched to my laptop monitor...the render on a 80k surface design took about 6s compared to 21 s on my large monitor...can anyone explain this?

When running these comparisons it's extremely important to make sure that the actions being done are exactly the same for each test. That includes closing the existing plan and duplicating the camera opening procedure. When a plan is first loaded and you activate a camera CA while perform a model rebuild first before sending things to your GPU for rendering. Once this is done and if nothing has changed in your plan subsequent opening of the camera will not require this model rebuild and will therefore run faster than the first original camera opening. If you do not wish to keep closing and opening the plan then open the plan, open the camera, ignore the time to render, then save/close the camera window and then open it and note the time. Another technique is to open the camera, again ignore the time, and then use the camera/view type drop down menu to flip the camera between different views, say standard view and then water colour.

2-3 seconds at most on my system using your water colour render plan test and opening the camera from plan view. If the camera is already open say in standard view then about 1 - 2 seconds when switched to water colour. Note I have a GTX 1060. 

Differences in time to render are most likely related to CPU differences between those posting results.

Are you certain you wish to place them inside of a cabinet. Though they can be built-in they are different than say a built-in oven or microwave which are specifically designed to be installed within a cabinet. So called built-in fridges and freezers are really designed where the cabinetry is built around the appliance, you place the appliance like a free standing one and then place the cabinets beside and above as required. For built-in fridges and freezers you must also consider that units can vary in respect to whether or not the doors are flush with the existing cabinetry doors, depending on this the required opening width may vary slightly depending upon the doors hinge system.

Do you mean LED "Rope" or "Tape" light. Rope lights are available in line and low voltage while Tape lights are low voltage only(requires driver/transformer).

https://www.flexfireleds.com/what-is-the-difference-between-rope-lights-and-led-strip-lights/

Wiring is going to vary according to a number of factors. If using a low voltage system there are limits as to how long a run of LED's can be supported by the driver/transformer, the other consideration is where will the transformer be located, at the point where the light run starts or in some other remote location and finally is the driver a plug in type or hardwired. For these I think Marks method depicts the devices and wiring accurately. Line voltage from switch to driver/transformer location and the low voltage from the driver/transformer to the low voltage lights.

Concerning the type of wire used for the runs that's the responsibility of the Electrician to ensure that the wire is capable of carrying the anticipated loads and meets all other code requirements.

You need to turn off all of your other lights, I only have the sun and the 6 area lights on in the scene. Turn all lights off and set the sun first, what's happening in your plan is that the other lights you have on are overwhelming the sun as their intensities are too high in respect to my suns 45 lux setting. First get the sun correct and then start working on your other lights. One other thing to remember, any material that is emissive also acts as a light contributor, they should all be set to zero until the sun and other lights have been set, you can then tweak the emissive materials so they look correct under those lighting conditions.

Here are the major light settings. Materials were just minor such as reflection, some emissive on the light lenses, etc.

I made a few changes to the sun, added a few area lights around the kitchen and changed a few material properties. All of these changes I made should be possible in HD PRO 2020.

I would recommend talking with CA technical support to see if CA even supports a dual graphics card setup, I don't believe it does. Just putting two or more graphics cards in your system dose not mean they will be utilized, the software program you use must be written to recognize and take advantage of them. It's similar to multi-threaded(cpu core) usage, those cores are available but it's primarily up to the software package as to their use or not.

Bluetooth and WiFi are two distinctly different forms of wireless communication. If your mouse is connected using Bluetooth then you can try disconnecting and reconnecting the Bluetooth mouse device, disable and enable the Bluetooth driver and/or reinstall the Bluetooth driver. One way to check if the mouse is ok is that most wireless mouse have the option to hard connect with a USB type cable, if so connect this way and if all is ok then your mouse is likely ok and it's most likely a software/driver issue.

7 minutes ago, Richard_Z said:

Thanks, I got it to work, but is there a way so drawer resizes with cabinet resizing?

You will need to adjust the symbol stretch planes, this will tell CA how to stretch it properly when you change the width or height of your cabinet. Just remember to update(replace) the appliance symbol from your library so the new stretch settings will take effect.

55 minutes ago, Richard_Z said:

Why new created objects added to library (like drawer box) are not available when trying to add to cabinet in plan? 

For something like a drawer box it needs to be treated as an appliance. Create an appliance opening in your cabinet and then select your library object that is to be used. For it to insert properly you may need to open up your library symbol and adjust the orientation offsets and sizing planes.

24 minutes ago, Timeless_16 said:

Tried this morning and same thing, only had a sliver of one of the recessed light rings, but everything else including the rest of the fixtures were gone. At this point. I think I'm going to stick with HD Pro PBR and see what happens.

I believe that if you are going to export a CA model for use in an independent renderer such as Twinmotion you need to create your CA model and assign CA materials with this in mind. It seems to me that in the conversion(export) process is not dissimilar to saving a symbol, individual surfaces are defined based upon the materials assigned to those surfaces. So like a symbol, if it has only one material when it is saved then it sees all surfaces as being one, if the symbol has 5 different materials when saved then it is seen as having 5 individual surfaces(components). So if you have a house model and all your ceilings, walls and trim are bone when you export then the program that imports this will not separate out the ceiling, walls and trim, if you then apply a new material all of those items will change and you will not be able to apply different materials to each surface. Maybe different in other rendering programs but this is what I noticed when playing with Twinmoition.

10 hours ago, Timeless_16 said:

I'll try that tomorrow and see what happens! Thanks.

Would be interesting to see how this goes. There has been considerable discussion about Twinmotion, some very enthusiastic, but so far I have not seen any interior renderings, just exterior which are much easier to do as these only involve the sun.

Yes, it does look as if you have fewer options concerning the material properties. However, as Chris_Kelly states lighting is extremely important, both sun and your actual light fixtures. You can play with material properties all day but if the lighting is not correct it will never look very good. In the sample you posted the lighting needs to be worked on, for example, if you have the option on your recessed lights to change the drop rate I would increase this to eliminate those hard transitions between lite regions and non lite regions. You may also need to adjust the sun angle and intensity, for most materials their reflective property is mostly influenced by the sun.

Here's an example on a project I'm working on now. The reflections in the backsplash tile are the result of the sun setting, same for the sheen on the cabinetry and the floor. The internal lights don't really contribute much to this reflectivity, you can see this if you look at the backsplash to the left, almost no visible reflectivity even though there are under-cabinet lights there.

In this example, same project, note the softness in the upper in-cabinet lights, no hard transitions, that's due to the drop rate being set higher to 9.0.

12 minutes ago, KenL-sdd said:

I just had a friend put in a GTX 2080. Until he made this change he had 4 to 6 seconds lag time...

Remove chief from your control panel and see what happens

As I said, no harm in checking. Can never say for sure but my suspicion is that upon the initial GTX 2080 install the card was not being recognized as 100% dedicated, could have been flipping back and forth between the integrated chip and the GTX depending upon demand. Assigning CA in the Nvidia DBX can resolve this problem but not always as this is mainly related to the power plan settings. However, if it worked it worked and at the end of the day that's really all that matters.

13 minutes ago, KenL-sdd said:

Be sure to go into NVIDIA control panel and set cheif X11 to use card. Otherwise chief is very slow. This should solve your issue. See attached.

Let me know.

Ken

Though this should always be done I have never found it to have much if any effect on speed, tends to be more related to display quality and certain camera attributes. No harm in checking.

If you are talking about having problems changing the color/finish of a cabinet or any other object one thing you need to first check is your plans list of materials. Often if you review this will see duplicates, these duplicates are problematic. Say your cabinet finish is color white and you wish to change it to color blue with the spray can, but in your plan materials there are two color whites in the list, when you select color blue from the library and hover over your color white cabinet and click apply which of the two color whites in the material list does it change. The one it changes may not be the one that is associated with that cabinet and therefore the cabinet color does not change. To overcome this issue just open up the plan material list and whenever you see a duplicate just use the rename function and add a prefix or suffix to it to make it unique, now everything should work just fine.

Not sure exactly why CA allows duplicate naming in the plan material list, this should never happen but it does and can happen very often if you are making lots of changes to your materials.

Welcome to Chief. There are times when library issues are related to the video card or video driver, these are used to generate the previews when you select an item. Make sure your video drivers are up-to-date. You should also add to your signature your system specs and version of Chief, it is very helpful when others are attempting to assist with issues.

I really don't think there is much you can do about this and I'm not sure there is much CA can do either. It seems that the handling of 2D graphics is done via a Microsoft module. To display things when panning and zooming in 2D all those vectors have to be recalculated and then rasterized. Most of this is CPU related computations and from I can see they are predominantly single threaded so there is an inherent limitation as complexity increases. As this discussion has evolved the only option is to use the display layer sets to reduce as much as possible the displayed graphics.

5 minutes ago, paulchoate said:

Thank you. I'll start looking into the layers. My system consists of a Ryzen 7 1800x CPU, Nvidea 1080 GPU, Samsung EVO 960 SSD, 654GB memory.

Worth looking into. Well I can see exactly what your issue is, you don't have enough memory!!!