TheKitchenAbode

Looks as if the font is correct as the individual characters have the same form. What is different is the character spacing(tracking), the distance between one character to the other. Are you certain that X9 is fixed on the exactly the same Font file as X7. A number of fonts come configured in several versions. Arial is a good example, there is Arial and also Arial Narrow. The narrow version is more compact like the one you want.

Although you have no active lights there is the sun. Have you tried toggling it off. You can also open up the camera DBX and uncheck the show shadows. Also, by default, if you have no light fixtures CA automatically inserts a default light source. To disable this just place a light somewhere and turn it off.

Interesting perspective, for some reason the words and tone struck a cord, something familiar, I've heard that before, somewhere but where. Checked out your website, now I understand. Many Thanks

I agree 200% with what you are stating. Just one thought though, to be "right" "always" means one has to have a full and complete understanding of each and every relevant variable along with the outcome of any and all interactions between those variables. If one has that then being "right" is just a natural result. It's nailing the former down that can be very time consuming and certainly frustrating for many. I personally don't mind the challenge, but I can fully understand how others expectations may differ as they are likely hoping that the software engineers would take care of that side of the equation for them.

Should also note that my initial concern about a possible bug as it relates to the garage defaults may not be the case. I will check further but I probably misunderstood from exactly which default settings DBX it was pulling it from. I will give myself a partial excuse on this by saying that it can be somewhat confusing, especially to a "Newbie", when there are so many different DBX's that provide access to these settings and the ability to override them. Same for the Default settings DBX, why is there a default stem wall setting under floors & rooms tab and then another set under foundation tab, should they not just be under the foundation tab, which one is really the default? or maybe I'm missing something here?

Larry - just one other observation. you have a bedroom along the back (the one with the double door sliding closet). It has a separate foundation than the surrounding rooms and the foundation stem walls & footings are different than those of the surrounding rooms. Is that intentional? I ask mainly because it's stem wall height is set to 30".

Just another note - you mention in the video about the "minimum height" designation for the stem wall. Looks like CA interprets this as meaning this is the height I want providing there are no other conflicting parameters. If there is then it adjusts the stem wall height accordingly. Maybe they feel that most users would prefer to have a workable foundation even if the some other parameter(s) was entered incorrectly.

Larry - Think I found it. In defaults, Floors & Rooms, Current Floor the stem Wall is set to 30". That seems to be why when you check using defaults in the floor DBX it pulls up 30". I guess when you open a rooms DBX it is getting the default from there. I believe the elusive 12" is the difference between the 30" default set here and the 18" default set under the foundation stem wall. 30" - 18" =12"

I'm still playing around with this. The model I'm using has just a garage attached to a single room house. The garage area is defined as a garage and the house portion is defined as living. I definitely believe you have uncovered a bug, just trying to figure out exactly where, when and why. Could you post the plan you are working with? That may make it easier to figure out the 12" mystery.

Will try again. When the room is defined as "Garage" the CA should use the default settings under "Garage Options" it seems to use these when a complete rebuild is done. But if you open the garages room DBX and click use default it will pull the stem wall height from the overall stem wall height instead of using the one under Garage Options.

Larry - I believe Perry has a good point. Have been playing with this. Not sure but what I have seen so far is that there appears to be a difference as to how CA treats the room defaults depending upon the rooms designation and whether you do a full foundation rebuild or whether you change the stem wall height via the rooms DBX. Though I would need to try a few more examples it looks like even if you have the garage defined as such CA only recognizes the stem wall default height as the one entered in the default DBX, Stem Walls, Minimum Height, even if you have set under garage options the height to be say greater. Maybe this better explains what I'm try to say. When you do a complete new rebuild of the foundation CA for the garage is using the Foundation Default Stem Wall Height from the Garage Options Minimum Height setting. But if you open the garage room DBX and check the stem wall default box it pulls the height from the foundation walls default stem wall entry, not the one under Garage options. It also seems that when you change the defaults they do not become valid unless you do a full foundation rebuild. Still may not make sense, but I believe it has something to do with this.

Speckles(fireflies) in Glass I have taken a closer look at the issue of speckles(fireflies) forming on glass materials. Here are my results, thoughts and recommendations. These annoying speckles seem to occur under one specific scenario. There must be at least two glass layers overlapping each other, photon mapping must be "On" and there must be a region that is viewable through the glass where there is a variance in a level of reflective light coming from the surface. In pondering what is really going on here I have concluded the following: The term speckles(fireflies) is likely incorrect. We should be calling this "Black Holes", it seems to be the inverse that's really the issue. Why? when photon mapping is turned on the path of a light ray is computed for 5 iterations(bounces), as glass has a reflective property there will always be a portion of light that will be bounced back to the other opposing layer of glass and then this glass layer will bounce back a portion of that light back. In other words there will always be a portion of light that is essentially trapped between the glass layers in a infinite bouncing back and forth between these opposing glass surfaces. For the camera to see the light ray it must get back to the camera within 5 bounces, if not the camera does not receive that ray of light, no ray of light means black. If you wish to see the best example of this then take two opposing mirrors where one mirror is visible within the other. Run a Ray Trace with photon mapping on and after 5 visible reflections in the mirror the 6th expected reflection will just be black. The engine will not calculate beyond the 5th bounce and a 6th reflection would mean the light ray would not be received by the camera within this 5 bounce limit. What can we do to overcome this? This one was very challenging, as in all of my tests I was unable to find anything such as material properties, ambient occlusion or Ray Trace duration that would have any significant direct effect. I'm not saying that these won't have any benefit at all, but I found the benefit to be minor and when using these to control the "Black Hole" formation they, being global type settings, also altered many of the unrelated aspects of the scene. When something such as ambient occlusion is being used to address this what you are really doing is just changing the contrast ratio in your scene. If the contrast ratio of the scene is lowered then the difference in luminosity between the brightest regions and darkest regions has been compressed and as such it is less visible, still there just not as obvious. Of coarse one could just turn off photon mapping but this also changes the entire look of your scene. You could also eliminate that background light variance but again you may be compromising your desired look. You could also just avoid double glass layer situations but then again you will restrict the models in your scene, no more glass pendants that's for sure. Personally these are not acceptable trade-offs. All is not Lost!!! I did however find one and only one procedure that allowed me to maintain all of my desired scene properties while at the same time make those "Black Holes" collapse. "Run the scene at a higher resolution and then resize it down." 15 passes run at 1200px X 600px, my normal print size. 15 passes run at 4800px X 2400px, resized back to 1200px X 600px. 15 passes run at 9600px X 4800px, resized back to 1200px X 600px. Why does this work. I believe it's all in the resizing algorithms. From a simplistic view point, when you downsize a pic the algorithms must make as best a pic as possible with fewer pixels. To do this they analyze two or more adjacent pixels and extrapolate a new single pixel that best represents their blending together. If the two original adjacent pixels have a significant variance in luminosity then the new single pixel will likely be halfway in the luminosity difference between the two original pixels, It can perform a bit like a very sophisticated contrast control that works on a pixel by pixel based analysis. There is however one price to pay for this, as you increase your Ray Trace pixel count it will take longer for the engine to calculate those additional pixels. Double the pixel width and height and the time per pass will quadruple as there are now 4 times the number of pixels to process. The first scene above took about 12 minutes at 1200 X 600 The second scene above took about 47 minutes at 4800 X 2400 The third scene above took about 188 minutes at 9600 X 4800 This negative time impact can be reduced due to the fact that increasing the number of pixels often reduces the number of passes needed to generate a clean scene when resizing down and as such, though you pay a per pass time penalty there is some compensation as fewer passes may be needed. Total time = time per pass X the number of passes. Resized 9600 X 4800, 15 passes, 188 minutes. Resized 9600 X 4800, 3 passes, 37 minutes. Original 1200 X 600, 15 passes, 12 minutes. Though I was not able to get my time down to the originals 12 minutes, I was able to reduce the first high resolution run of 15 passes 188 minutes down to 3 passes in 37 minutes while maintaining about 90% of the longer hi resolution scenes quality. Though not perfect it is significantly better than the bottom regular pixel sized pic. Hope this proves helpful.

Thanks Kevin. Just about all of the materials are per their default settings from the CA library. If I recall I added a bump map to the carpet and ledger stone on the fireplace. The floor is standard polished finish. The only other material alteration was the sofa, just boosted the specular. I've found that under the right lighting conditions that most of the materials render reasonably well at their defaults.

Thanks Johnny, Things are starting to congeal quite well as I nail things down. In this set I just dropped in the lights from the previous set and set the Ray Trace parameters the same. The resulting look is very similar. There are no significant changes to the materials, 99% of them are as per their default settings. Thanks once again

Another set of Ray Traces just run. These are essentially done in about 20 passes taking about 19 minutes on my rig. Excuse those two wall sconces, did not have time to fix their point lights.

Thanks Yusuf. Yes I do attempt to utilize a scientific methodology in my tests, It's due to spending at least 15 years in a research and development environment. When I make these statements they are not based upon random daily experiences. I devise specific tests to identify and isolate what I'm attempting to observe and understand. Any conclusion I surmise is then tested for repeatability and predictability. This does not mean that every possible interaction has been explored or verified but it does tend to provide a reasonable weighting value as to the fundamental validity of what has been observed and the drawn upon conclusions.

I believe they are tied together. If you select the material you want and then select the "C" painter option and then paint the item you want to be different, then if the other item also changes then they are tied together, if only the single item changes then they are independent.

If the material region represents something that is applied to the walls finish surface(layer) then you should uncheck "Cut Finish Layers of Parent Object". This will position your material region and all of it's layers as they would be in real life, from the drywall surface and towards the rooms interior. However, the line will still show through. The grey area here is a material region placed on the surface and the underlying wall connection line is still telegraphing through it. As mentioned before, it only shows for me at certain camera angles in vector view.

You can do that but it will only affect cabinets placed after the fact. It will not automatically go through and reconfigure all of the existing cabinets unless you redefine in the defaults all of the individual default settings like the door/drawer type etc. If you have done any customization on an existing cabinet then this will remain as it will not be defined as default. Why do you need to change the name. I don't think those manufacture catalogs are designed for ordering purposes, certainly not like 2020 where the catalogs are directly tied to the manufactures order, pricing and production systems.

Not that I'm aware of.

I guess it makes sense as a material region is actual a component of the wall, it's just a wall layer (like the drywall) that can be independently adjusted. If there is any wall joints, desired or not, then these carry on through the material region.

Just played with this. Yes with a material region the union where the two wall types meet seems to telegraph through. Only shows up for me when in vector mode and only at certain camera angles. The sample posted shows it running through the material region(grey) but does not telegraph through when I placed a picture frame from the library. This frame is placed partially into the wall. Maybe using a partition or polyline solid instead of the material region would solve this issue.

Light Bleed - Conclusions I have now run a wide range of tests concerning this issue. Here are my conclusions and recommendations based upon what I have seen so far. Conclusions - Light bleed occurs on the interior when the exterior lighting luminosity(brightness) is too intense. - When it results from the Direct Sunlight, bleeding occurs primarily along wall & ceiling intersects. - When it results from the Environment Light, bleeding occurs primarily along wall & floor intersects and underneath floor placed items. Direct methods to control Direct Sunlight bleed - Place a roof on the structure. This works due to the fact that the roof and overhangs cast exterior shadows in the most vulnerable bleed regions. These shadows are just areas of lower luminosity. - Reduce the intensity of the direct sunlight. This can be done one of two ways, reduce the slider setting or reduce the luminosity level of the suns color. Indirect Methods to control Direct Sun bleed - If not too severe then adjusting the ambient occlusion may help. Dependent upon the settings this can reduce the contrast in the wall & ceiling region which will therefore affect the bleeds visibility. - Increase the interior ambient light level. Again this will reduce contrast and will therefore affect the bleeds visibility. Direct methods to control Environment Lighting bleed - Place a foundation with a floor under your structure. Works for similar reasons as stated for the direct sun. Also, though not fully explored as of yet, the presence of a terrain also seems to have an impact. - Reduce the intensity of the Environment Lighting. There are four ways to due this, reduce the slider setting. If it is set to "Use Color" then the luminosity level of the color can be reduced. Select the "Use Sky" option or select the "Use Backdrop Image", these work as their level of luminosity is much lower than the default RGB 255,255,255 luminosity. Indirect Methods to control Environment Lighting bleed. - Same as those above for the Direct Sun To summarize, it's all about the level(degree) of luminosity that the exterior is being subjected to, when set too high light bleed will result. This does not preclude one from creating interior lighting effects of direct and indirect exterior lighting, it just means that there are limitations as to how far you can go through the use of the Direct Sun and Environment lighting controls. Consider using parallel lights to amplify the direct sun effect or 3D point and spots to simulate the environment lighting effect. Hope this helps.

For the ones I posted they took about 30 minutes each for a 1200 X 600 pixel size. Could have run longer or at a higher pixel size to get rid of those sparkles in the glass pendants.

100% CA, 100% Ray Trace with minor highlight/shadow adjustment and a smidge of sharpening.