TheKitchenAbode

Just a guess, maybe you need to increase the thickness of the siding material region. Graham

Glad this helped Greg. I have learned over the years to temper my system tweaking and as a result I seem to have fewer issues. Too many times those tweaks that seemed beneficial at the time would only lead to unexpected issues later on. On top of that it was very difficult to resolve a problem as I would rarely remember what my tweak settings were or my premise for doing it in the first place. Also, I you need outside tech support it is really difficult or impossible for them to assist if you have altered things from their original settings. Some things are just best left alone, if it ain't broke then why fix it, or maybe better why waste your time trying to reinvent the wheel. Graham

Having everything on the SSD drive is as good as it gets. Use the other HDD for archiving, or infrequently accessed files if your SSD is getting full. Also, not sure splitting up core Chief files is the best idea, Chief has default locations for file storage and if you change these you will likely have to do this each time you upgrade. From my perspective you are best to leave things as per the software developers design, although it may not appear obvious they usually have solid reasoning for setting things up a certain way. Graham

Is the camera in the room or is it outside with clipping or looking through a door opening into the room. The lights used in camera views are determined by the lights that are in the same room as the camera. Also check the light fixtures light data DBX, at the bottom there are options to display the fixture in all view types, camera view only and raytrace only, make sure the appropriate boxes are checked. Graham

Not aware of any size limitations, might as well download them, you can always delete the ones you don't end up using. Graham

There is no tilt angle for a point light, it emmits light in all directions. You need to change the light type to a spot light, then you can adjust the tilt angle. Just remember each of those sconces have three bulbs, need to change all of them. Graham

Library, Bonus Catalogs, Kitchen Acessories, Cabinet Trim Graham

Karl, pleased that you found this helpfull. There are also a number of informative reviews and comparisons at this site. http://www.tomshardware.com/. They provide updated "best picks" within differing price levels. Graham

You should post the plan. It's not possible to provide specific guidance without it, just too many variables. Graham

From my investigations it appears that SSD's have about the same overall reliability as a traditional HDD. Most current SDD's have their own built-in software to manage everything so they are best to be left alone. Newer ones also have management software to address the writing limitations so the same cell is not being constantly written to. However nothing is infallible, "always back-up". Graham

The other thing to watch out for is if you mistakenly encompass a camera within your selection. The rotate handle will only display if all of the selected items are rotatable. Graham

Here's a link to a review several cards comparing 2GB & 4GB and high resolution performance. Worth reading. http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/6389/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-4gb-review-what-difference-does-extra-vram-make Graham

Not sure what the real advantage is with a software Ramdisk. When you boot-up the program still has to be loaded from your other drive into the dedicated memory ram area, this is no different than what happens when you first start a program. I understand that while the program is running in the dedicated memory area it is also saving/backing up the files to your Ram. This would be faster, but I have never sensed any system slowness due to this. Also, if your system crashes or there is a power glitch everything is lost as your working file and it's backups are only in your volatile Ram. Graham

Perry, could do, it just depends on the number of programs running, their RAM requirements and the number of active working files. Checking Task Manager will show RAM usage so you can see how much of the 12 is being used. I know that some video editing software and Photoshop, depending on the working file size, can really eat up RAM. Most other regular programs such as Office including Chief are not overly demanding and 8GB should rarely be exceeded. Graham

To get the maximum performance from an SSD it must be setup as your primary boot drive with the operating system, programs must be installed on it and your active files must be on it. It will now be your "C" drive. If you have retained your former hard drive it will now be "D" and you would use it for archiving purposes. The SSD only improves program/file read/write operations. Once your program and file is loaded into Ram then the SSD does not have much impact, It would only provide a benefit if you have too little Ram which would then necessitate file swapping which should not be an issue if you have 8GB of Ram or more. Graham

Just an added note. From my experimentation the speckels/grains appear to be somewhat related to the how light is treated as it passes through another material such as a window or lamp shade. Point lights and sunlight are prime examples. If you turn off the point lights or sunlight and the speckles/grains disappear or significantly reduce then this is where the main issue is. If the lighting is needed then you can either reduce the light intensity or adjust the lamp shade or glass properties to minimize this effect. Increasing transparency or reducing diffusion or both can help. Graham

As Mike suggests, you can turn off photon mapping to eliminate this or run more passes, might take 50 or more to clean things up. If you want the look that photon mapping provides with less speckles you can try reducing down the intensity of your lights, turning lights off or decreasing the diffusion on some of the materials. From the pic it looks like the floor standing lamp by the wall pics is way too bright. Even if your overall scene appears on the dark side you can always use the intensity, softness and brightness controls to correct for this. Graham

Agree Larry, I give Cinebench a high level of consideration as it is based on Cinema 4D which is a 3d rendering program that is highly CPU and Open GL dependent. As you mention there is also Passmark and several others such as WinZip and SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks that provide a good indication of CPU performance. Tom's Hardware also provides benchmarks for Blender, Photoshop, Word, Excel and other specific programs and games. All of these should be taken into consideration as our systems are used for more than just Raytracing. The challenge for most is finding the appropriate balance that addresses specific performance, multi-tasking and video needs within some budgetary restraint. Unfortunately there will always be compromises until the day comes that we can get a quantum computer for $1,500, at which time we will no longer be needed ​ Graham

Andy, not sure what CPUs' or benchmark test(s) you are using to base your rendering speed conclusions on. I primarily focus on the Cinebench comparisons as strong indicator of Raytrace rendering performance. Currently Intel I7 4th, 5th and the newest 6th generation series easily outperform the AMD FX8350. The AMD is less expensive but if one considers the performance gain of say an Intel I7 Skylake 6700k provides I think the extra dollars are well worth it. Graham

Personally Chief in itself is not a particularily demanding program unless Raytracing or using live camera views or walkthroughs with shadows and lots of line smoothing are required or your models are huge. I have run Chief on 10 year old systems with integrated video without any real issues per say. However, for most users, including myself, Chief is not the only program that is being run on their system and as such you have to take into account the cumulative effect of all of these programs and their demand on your system resources. Keep in mind that they all have to share to some degree the CPU, GPU, RAM and Disk Storage. Most real problems occur when two or more programs need to utilize the same resource at the same time. For example, a Raytrace is running in the background and a pic is being edited in Photoshop, both of these programs are highly CPU dependent and as such there will be a slowing down in their completion time and quite likely a noticeable lag as you execute commands or movement. In order to anticipate potential system bottlenecks requires one to take a hard look at the software being run and your workflow setup. From this you can then establish a prioritized list of where system resource sharing conflicts are most likely to occur and therefore where your dollars will deliver the greatest return on investment. Graham

Well said Dennis. There are settings, lights and, material types & properties that all impact on a scences final look. Add to this the users intent and the time one is willing to spend, there are many variables one needs to get thier head rapped around in order to generate a predictable and consistent scene. As you indicate, there is no simple single type of switch one can flip to make it all come together. Given this reality I can only suggest that one must take the time to systematically experiment with a scene in an attempt to understand how it is impacted by a particular setting adjustment. In the meantime, as Shelby did, post your issue and there are many great people here that are more than willing to share their experiences and knowledge to assist. This original posting is a great example, within about 4 hours the improvement in the Raytrace result is Night & Day. Graham

If I use these I've always typed in the %. In most cases I save the image and use other image editors. Always found this built-in adjuster to be very basic, even Microsofts photo app editor is far better, it provides highlight and shadow adjustments. Next level would be Photoscape and then Photoshop if required. However, if the built-ins' could be improved, more features, better algorithms and slider control it could definitely be a time saver. Graham

I do not belive you can run the program from a cloud server. Even if you could it would be way to slow. I only use the cloud (OneDrive) to store and sync files so they are available on all my systems. Tried to put the catalogs in the cloud a year or so ago and it did not work, was hoping that the catalogs could be synced with my other systems so that the catalog when updated on one was also updated on all computers, would save having to download the catalogs for each system seperately. Graham

There should be no need to delete plan items. As Dennis suggests, the first approach should be to turn off all lights that are not in the scene. Keep in mind that point lights will really slow things down; so if they are not needed then turn them off or change them to a spot light. You can also turn off photon mapping & compute caustics if you do not need it. Raytrace, as it's name implies, calculates a scene based on light rays emitting from a source and it's effect when striking another material, no light rays, then there really is nothing to compute. Graham

It's important to understand that there are two distinctly different ways to display views of a particular scene, and depending upon which method you use there are inherent advantages one has over the other. The first encompasses floor plan, elevations and 3D camera views. These are generated using Open GL (software) and your graphics chip (discrete or integrated), commonly referred to as your "GPU" or Graphics Processing Unit. The generated scenes are dynamic, allowing you to zoom in & out, rotate and move around. As they are dynamic the scene must be rapidly regenerated to provide as smooth a movement as possible, which is the primary reason most users recommend using a higher end discrete graphics card. This becomes most important if you wish to have your dynamic scenes generated with maximum line smoothing and shadows as this requires an extreme amount of processing to regenerate the scene during movement. In respect to lights, their display is determined by the graphics card/chip manufacturer and for whatever reason they have decided to limit them to only 8 active lights for any given scene. This 8 light limit is independent of how many lights you have turned on within Chief, only 8 max will be used, the others will be ignored. These viewing methods are design to be actively used during your design process. The second scene generation method involves "Raytracing" (Raytrace). This is a program specifically designed to render high quality photo realistic static scenes. The Raytrace module in Chief does not use your graphics card/chip or Open GL, it's an independent program that utilizes the main CPU (Central Processing Unit) to crunch through the calculations. This is why most users recommend higher end CPUs such as I7 or Xeon with as many cores/threads as one can afford. These scenes are static, you can't actively move around within them. As Raytracing does not utilize your graphics card/chip it is not limited in the number of lights it can render and it will in fact perform computations on all lights turned on in Chief regardless of the number within the scene. As the number of lights and their type (spot/point) have a direct impact on rendering time most users recommend turning off all lights that are not visible in the scene, which is one of the most effective ways to decrease your rendering time. This scene generation method is designed to generate presentation grade rendered scenes after the design process if finished. Hope this helps, Graham