TheKitchenAbode

PBR Higher Levels of Reflection & Gloss (cont'd) Been evaluating this a bit further. Seems that the reflections are primarily associated with the Sun, actual light fixtures do not seem to be a significant contributor to this effect. In these PBR's I have cranked up the sun, to avoid overexposure the Camera Exposure is trimmed back. I'm using the Generic Sun, it's angle and direction are important and needs to be adjusted so the reflections show up on the desired surfaces. The backdrop image is also important as it's colour and brightness will be a contributor to the effect. Keep in mind that as you crank up the sun you will also need to crank up the Lumen level of your light fixtures. In these samples the recessed cans are around 2,500 lumens. In these PBR's the sun is around 400,000 Lux.

Suggest you go to Houzz.com and check out "Stories and Advice", "Houzz Discussions", "Design Dilemma", there are many posters in this forum that post their projects and plans for advice and critique. It's not very pretty as the sharks swarm in and rip it to shreds. It can get real ugly as the conversation rapidly degrades into personally oriented attacks, even by the so called Pros. Personally, if you are satisfied with your design work and your clients are also happy then what does it matter what others think. If you are looking to push the envelope then I suggest you Google top Architectural and Design firms and study their work for inspiration and to see how they approached a particular challenge. Even Franklin Lloyd wright did this through his studies and travels as evident in the strong Asian influence in many of his designs.

I have had problems in the past when the same material name is duplicated in the plan material list, it can cause problems when using the eyedropper tool. It sees the material you want to paint as already having the same name and it does not apply the picked material.

Agree. After doing this if you check the plan material list you will have say three materials with exactly the same name, one for each. No way to tell which belongs to what item. If CA is going to automatically create these they should name them with a suffix such as 1, 2, 3 so they can be individually identified.

Just to make matters more frustrating you have to then do this again if you want the Pattern to match the Texture.

Absolutely - From my experience controlling the texture or pattern on an object is a mess, it's just a guessing game as you play with the offsets trying to get an exact position. For tile work I have to place a cad line in elevation to show where I want the grout line, then start plugging in offsets until the texture matches the cad line, might take 5 or more entries to get it right.

Totally agree. I'm just playing with this now, don't see any difference with it checked or unchecked. Really doesn't say much about it in the reference manual. However, I think this is only applicable to "Symbols" not any other object types. Just reading page 963 in the reference manual, talks about Symbol Origin.

I've never actually played with that feature. I often need to adjust the pattern and texture when doing tile layout work. What I do, say for a bath tub, is to create three copies of the texture, left end wall, back wall and right end wall. I then apply these to the appropriate wall material region and then adjust each one individually. The other thing I have noticed is that depending upon the type of object the texture is being applied to is that it's default orientation is determined by the objects width and height. For example, on a cabinet partition and apply a wood grain texture. The texture automatically orientates to the greater dimension, if you resize the partition then the wood grain will automatically flip if the other dimension exceeds the previous one.

Another consideration is that the 1950X CPU is not the fastest when it comes to single threaded performance. CA is a mixed bag with some multi-thread optimization and single threaded operations. The only true multi-core function in CA is RayTrace. When you open up a camera view CA has to build the model before sending it to your GPU, this is CPU based so no matter how powerful your GPU is it will be of no help until your CPU is finished. This will also occur every time you make a change to your 3D model, CA must process the change and then update the GPU. As model complexity increases the time to process increases. As mention, if you open up the Windows Task Manger you can see this happening, just watch the CPU and GPU % usage levels and when they occur.

Your hardware specs are well above the minimum required and as such your performance should be about as good as it gets. The fact that you are experiencing slowness with camera related functions could indicate that your 1080TI graphics card may not be properly assigned to CA, especially if your system also has an integrated on board graphics chip. Regardless of system power, CA will naturally slow down as plan complexity increases. How large is the plan and how many surfaces does it have to deal with. If you post your plan others could test it to see if they experience similar slowness, this would tell you if it's something in your plan and not your system. The other issue could be that there is some program running in the background that's consuming your CPU. Suggest opening up the Windows Task Manger, it will show each active process and the % CPU load. When idle this should be no more than about 2%. You can watch this to see the CPU loading when performing operations, it will also show your Graphics card loading. The graphics card usage will also show in the case your system also has an integrated chip if it is using it all or some of the time. With an integrated chip it will show as GPU 0 and your discrete 1080 TI will show as GPU 1, If you 1080 TI is set properly it will only show GPU 1.

Alvar - Nice examples of how impactful the lighting is. I'm also certain you found it easier to tweak/adjust the material properties once the lighting has been reasonably balanced.

If you just change the molding height on the pantry by 1/16" up or down it will disconnect from the other molding and it will be treated individually. No one will notice the slight 1/16" position change.

Try using Wall Material Regions, they will conform to the wall. They are not really any different than a polyline solid other than their linking to the wall surface.

Try to lower it's height, I usually place the 3D lights about 60% from the floor to the ceiling. Also, you will likely have to reduce it's intensity. It's difficult to achieve using only one single light, just place a few throughout the scene at lower intensity.