TheKitchenAbode

Tommy - Great tip/technique, I will definitely give that a try. There are symbols with shapes that are not easy to create in CA, being able to extract those and then build a new symbol using them would be very useful.

Unfortunately once something has been converted to a symbol it cannot be reverted back to it's original components. You can only adjust it through the limited options in the symbols DBX. This has also been a common complaint by others that individual component data that was used to make the symbol should be retained so one could go back as you wish to and make alterations. Currently only Architectural blocks permit this type of deconstruction.

The only thing I can think of that would work under all camera views would be to use the 3D symbols to place your name somewhere within the scene. You could also build a 3D model of your logo using Polysolids, this should also show up in all camera view modes.

Scott - very good point concerning the CA content %. It would also be just as important to know what % of involvement the poster themselves had in this. Just posting other peoples work that was obviously not done in any part using CA, though interesting, is not really relevant to what one can achieve using CA. That would be no different than me showing my clients kitchen designs done by others, they don't need to know what other designers can do, they need to know what I can do. There is validity in the fact that CA has an export function and as such direct discussion on how to do this is certainly well within the realm of CA. The issue here in this particular posting is that this is not what is being discussed, it's become a meaningless exercise with no productive outcome in sight. It's a bit like arguing over which is better a pickup truck or a Ferrari, it all depends on the context. If I need to drive on the Autobahn at 250 miles an hour then it's the Ferrari, but if I need to go to Home Depot for some drywall then it's the pickup truck. I believe that 99.9% of CA users are in the pickup truck camp, what's of utmost importance is the ability to generate working drawings suitable for permit submission and the actual construction of a home, pretty pictures will not suffice. That's were CA needs to focus it's attention because that's why we chose it and that's what we need it to do. For those that need a Ferrari then there are lots of those for sale already.

Thanks Jintu, what's interesting is that many of those functions are similar to some extent as to what one would find in say Photoshop or one of it's plug-ins. Doesn't surprise me as it would be a natural evolution of these rendering programs and certainly advantageous to it's users in reducing the necessity to perform extensive post rendering processing work using other programs. In the tutorial link I sent a few days ago this was often mentioned.

What is it that you are not convinced of? When I make a recommendation I provide a significant degree of supportive evidence to validate what I state. I also attempt to explain in detail my observations and conclusions based upon many test conditions. I rarely if ever state that my recommendations are carved in stone and always welcome being questioned about my results and methods. If someone can demonstrate a better approach then I could not be happier. The intent is not who is right or wrong, it's to motivate the thinking process so hopefully we will get to the right answer one way or the other. I could care less who comes up with the ultimate answer.

Lighting - Point Lights Versus Spot Lights In CA the two most used types of lights are point lights and spot lights. Point lights provide a single point where the light spreads out evenly over 360 degrees, they typically represent the type of light of a standard light bulb and are most often used in light fixtures such as wall sconces, chandeliers, table lamps and so forth. Spot lights are directional, their light spread is dictated by the set cut-off angle which creates a cone effect with it's point closest to the light source and spreading outward. These represent they type of light one would expect from a typical recessed ceiling fixture. With point lights as with all lights you can control the intensity and whether or not to have shadows. Concerning shadows, point lights have the added capacity to produce what's termed as soft shadows. These are shadow effects that are less intense than normal shadows. Spot lights allow for intensity and shadows but they do not have a specific soft shadow feature. Instead, they have a drop rate function that permits you to set how much the lights intensity diminishes as it gets further away from it's source. Setting this higher when shadows are turned on will effectively reduce the shadows intensity as a lower level of light will naturally create a less intense shadow. There is also one very important item to consider between these two types of light, their impact on Ray Trace time. Point lights require considerably more computational time than spot lights and this time is directly related to the number of active point lights in your plan regardless of whether they are visible in the scene. To demonstrate this I have taken a basic wall sconce from the library, it's default light source is a single point light. I duplicated it 34 times to demonstrate the impact of having many point lights in a plan. Point Light Sconces_25 passes_118 minutes. To provide a comparison I took the same fixture and replaced it's point light with a spot light, made some adjustment to get a reasonable representation of the point lights effect. Spot Light Sconces_25 passes_5 minutes. As you can see, the effect on Ray Trace time is substantial, the point light wall sconce version took 18 times longer to render than the spot light versions. And in my opinion the spot light version is likely more representative of how this type of fixture would appear, it has a clear glass shade and light would not just be emitted from the top only. Hope this helps.

Much more impressive, I'm certain what we all wish to know is was when you choose custom what steps were involved to get it to that level of quality.

"In the sample scenes below, I used Daytime Style for both Exterior and Interior. What you see in the Teaser is really what you'll get." I'm not question your integrity or Lumion's. I have repeatedly and always stated that this program can deliver exception results, way beyond the capabilities of Ray Trace. I only choose that one because it was focused on more than the others. I did not state that the rendering was bad, just attempting to get a handle on what it really takes to get those spectacular results. Your demonstration of those new features is valid, but those one-clickers did not produce a truly photo realistic rendering. Please try not to interpret my questioning as an attempt to undermine your efforts or qualifications, that is not my intention at all; and try not taking such a strong defensive position and I'm certain you would find the conversation to be far more fruitful and beneficial to all.

Really, here's that scene from the Lumion gallery. They don't look anywhere close to me.

Agree 100%. It's always interesting to see what's going on in the industry but there comes a point where it seems more like a promotional sales pitch for another software company. Unfortunately this tone, intentional or not, effectively undermines the capabilities of CA. It should be realized that potential purchasers of CA have access to certain parts of this forum as they evaluate CA prior to purchase. Too much of this type of discussion can unintentional and unfairly result in a lost sale and that effects everyone of us. The only way a company can fund it's future is through constant growth and that means more sales every year and when it comes to sales every sale is important.

There's really no need to have LTE built into your laptop, just tether it to your phone through your Bluetooth. Saves having to pay for an additional device on your mobile plan.

I don't dispute the capabilities of these specialized renderers, their feature set is way beyond those of our poor little Ray Trace engine, no argument there. I do however feel that the Ray Trace engine is being underestimated and that these specialized renderers are being somewhat misrepresented by some as to what it really takes to obtain results such as that depicted in the Lumion 8 Bistro scene. So far, I have not yet seen any real projects posted by CA users that come anywhere close to this regardless of the rendering software being used, there must be a reason for this. Could it be that the skills and techniques needed only belong to an exclusive group of highly experienced experts, I think so. I'm not suggesting that one not pursue these programs, just recommending that you do so with a proper understanding as to what is actually involved, especially if one is going to drop $3,000 or more. Just like CA, they way this software works is, "it's not what the software can do for you", "it's what you can do with the software". Just an example. Here is an exterior Ray Trace with just a few adjustments in Photoshop.

Thought it might be interesting to find a comparison to demonstrate the degree of improvement that can be obtained as one endeavors to get a handle on how the Ray Trace engine functions and how to balance the lighting and materials. Here is one of my typical Ray Traces from 2013. Here is a typical Ray Trace in 2017.

The time per pass depends primarily on your computer, size in pixels of the pic and the number and types of lights. Looking at your posted pic I would think it will need at least 30 or more passes to clean-up the grain.

It looks to me as if Photon Mapping was on in the lower pic and off in the upper.

Hi Scott, if you wish to see what it really takes to achieve that level of realism check-out the tutorials here. https://www.ronenbekerman.com/category/tutorials/making-of/ They go through the complete workflow including post production. Also, keep-in-mind that these are being done by the best of the best graphics designers. Just dropping in our CA model and hitting render is just not going to do it.

This is becoming more and more important if you do not wish to get involved in a dispute. If you are preparing the drawings then they need to be correct because when something goes wrong the first thing they will say "but that's what the drawing shows", now you're on the hook.

Thanks Johnny, nice example. The polyline portion of the step profile could be extruded to provide the 3d model. As in your sample, it's would be easy to incorporate features such as the slight angle on the riser, a tread nosing profile or the radius on the front of the tread. If one did not want to manually calculate, you could use the basic stair building tool first and then extract the numbers from it to build your polyline model.

If it's just a simple staircase have you considered just using a polyline solid, shaped according to a side view and then extruded to the proper width?

Last but not least is so called Biased versus UnBiased methodologies. This I no is a very tenacious subject, but what the heck! I have done some fairly intense research on this, not only what the differing rendering software providers have to say but also on some abstract summaries. I can only conclude from this that though biased and unbiased differ in their approach, the general public tends to place too much emphasizes on this as it relates to rendering quality. Yes, theoretically the unbiased approach should produce a superior rendering. What is not often mentioned, depending upon which side of the fence you sit, is at what point in time does this potential superiority become noticeable and even if noticeable does it actually make one render superior to another from an aesthetic point of view. Please keep-in-mind that I'm talking about the core primary methodologies here, not the fact that these rendering software packages may have many other added feature sets which are often unintentionally considered as part of the biased versus unbiased conversation. First, these two terms are not really technically correct, which unfortunately is not often realized by most and the software companies don't really care as these terms provide them with an emotional interpretation that enables them to differentiate their products from each other. Biased implies that this method intentionally alters/injects something into something to impart/change something from what it should be to something else. I take a pic with my camera, I have a preference for punchy color, so I always boost the saturation to obtain this look, I have introduced a color saturation biased. This however is not what is happening in a so called biased approach. Both approaches are attempting to produce as accurate a representation as possible; the fundimental difference relates to how far one needs to go to get there. What it all comes down to is that a Biased approach operates under the principle that there is a point where continuing to perform a computation will not result in a precievable improvement in the quality of the image and therefore it serves no practicle purpose in continuing to do so. Unbiased on the otherhand does not impose this computational cut-off point and as such will continue to perform the computation indefinitely. There is also another commonly used term called "Accuracy" and that one method is more accurate than the other. What they fail to expand on is "Accurate to What?" When they reference accuracy they are not really saying they are accurate as it relates to how something would appear to the eye in real life under real lighting conditions. What they are stating is that the scene will be accurate according to the lighting that you have defined in your scene. If the ultimate test of Accuracy is real life then regardless of the engine type, if you make any light alteration other than what could naturaly occur then you are infact introducing a Biased. It's truley ironic because at the end of the day what we really want is a rendering program the provides us with the greatest capability to introduce and control Biased. That's the only way you can generate those beautiful artistic scenes. That's why photography professionals gravitate to PhotoShop it provides the ability to defy nature so you can incorporate your own personal interpretation/expression of the scene. Painters do this all the time, they don't paint a technically accurate scene, through their brush strokes and color modifications they reconstruct a new scene that in many cases looks nothing like the original referenced scene, but by injecting Biased they have created something far more expressive and intriguing. Why would I go to an art gallery to look at a tree that looks the same as the one in my front yard?

Thanks Rene - I fully agree and have suggested in past postings that CA should partner with such a rendering specialist and put his whole issue to bed once and for all. In the meantime, I did recently suggest that they at least add an additional entry box in the Ray Trace DBX that would allow us to set the MaxRecLev to whatever level we desire, no different than setting the number of cores we wish to be utilized. Given that this is a global declared variable it should be child's play for the software engineer. If I could get at the code I would do it myself, probably take about 5 minutes.

My "Black Hole" theory - based on my assumptions as to what could be happening here I checked out the coding instructions/tutorials related to PovRay. Many aspects of PovRay should be relevant as the CA RayTrace engine is fundamentally based upon this tracer. These are the declared Global settings, I have eliminated the unrelated ones for clarification purposes. 2.3.11.4 Global settings #declare MaxRecLev = 5; #declare BGColor = <0,0,0>; MaxRecLev limits the maximum number of recursive reflections the code will calculate. BGColor defines the color of the rays which do not hit anything. It is equivalent to the background block of POV-Ray. 2.3.11.8.8 Reflection Calculation // Reflection: #if(recLev < MaxRecLev & Coord[closest][1].y > 0) #local Pixel = Pixel + Trace(IP, Refl, recLev+1)*Coord[closest][1].y; #end This is where the recursive call happens (the macro calls itself). The recursion level (recLev) is increased by one for the next call so that somewhere down the line, the series of Trace() calls will know to stop (preventing a ray from bouncing back and forth forever between two mirrors). This is basically how the max_trace_level global setting works in POV-Ray. 2.3.11.8.2 If the ray doesn't hit anything // If not found, return background color: #if(closest = ObjAmnt) #local Pixel = BGColor; If the ray did not hit any sphere, what we do is just to return the bacground color (defined by the BGColor identifier). As you can see the number of bounces/reflections is defined through "MaxRecLev", it is set to "5". The default background color "BGColor" is set to RGB 0,0,0 (Black). In the reflections calculation they compute 5 iterations, if the light ray does not return to the camera then it assigns the background colour to it, which is black.

I typically use a cabinet partition for bathroom wall tiles. Set the thickness to represent the tile and place against the wall, you can then drag it to the exact position you wish and it is not affected by the underlying wall constraints or other abutting walls.

Rene - Concerning fall-off(drop-off-rate). I did experiment with this and as would be expected it did have some positive effect. Though I did not discuss this at the time I categorize it in my indirect grouping as when this is changed it also impacts on other items in the scene, not just the Black Holes. It really does not do much more than just turning down a lights intensity except that the intensity drop is relevant to the light rays distance from the originating source. Also, the effect was not significant in my test set-up. This may have been due to the relative distance of the glass fixture from the aggravating light, possibly too close for the drop rate, but I did try some ridiculously high numbers. All I can say for sure at this time is that to-date, my theory right or wrong, has reliably predicted if a proposed action would have an effect or not; and so far the only reliable and predictable direct method I have been able to isolate is to use the downsizing technique. It attacks the Black Holes without compromising any other setting.