TheKitchenAbode

If they are only grey in the floor plan view then it sounds like the default fill color has been altered. Go into defaults, cabinets, base cabinets for the fill setting. Other spot may be in the layer setting for base cabinets. Graham

Not directly. The interior finish is the same as the box finish in the Cabinet DBX for materials. You could float in thin panels to cover the interior surface, use shelves and partitions. Then paint these the interior color. An alternative would be to make the box color the interior color and then clad the box sides with thin panels say 1/16" and paint these the exterior finish. Graham

In general the desktop chip will be faster than the mobile version. Laptops, especially in those really thin & light units, have to take into consideration power consumption & heat dissipation so the chips are designed to only run at full GHZ for short bursts, they usually run most of the time a lower clock rates. The gaming laptops and workstation laptops are thicker and heavier to accommodate not just the discrete graphics card but also bigger fans and batteries. Personally if I was buying another laptop I'd be looking for one with a discrete graphics card and if budget was a consideration I'd likely go for an I5 with a discrete graphics card versus an I7 with only integrated graphics. Keep in mind that the integrated graphics will always be consuming a portion of the I7's power and will still not provide the same graphics capability as the discrete card. I would suspect that the I5 combo would be a very close match or possible beat the I7 integrated system. Graham

Just ran a schedule. That just doesn't make any sense. The cabinet box height should be the overall height - countertop thickness. Also, the countertop thickness does not show in the schedule, even when using a custom counter top. Seems like this would be a very easy fix. Graham

I just played with this a bit. Yes as you noted, the two will only coexist when the overlap is less than 1/2 of the cabinet width. If I changed the countertop height on one of the boxes then the custom counter automatically adjusted to this new thickness over all of the cabinets. Same goes for the backsplash height, seems to default to the cabinet with the greatest height. You can get the countertop below to punch through but the custom top needs to be a certain distance above the cabinet box, not very practical but kind of interesting, guess the custom countertop must be within a certain proximity to the cabinet below before it automatically kicks in. However, if you want to control both then just use a slab or polyline solid for the custom countertop. Then the cabinet countertop below can be thickened to just punch right through. Graham

I don't use the schedule but doesn't Chief subtract off the countertop thickness to derive the actual box height? Graham

Michael - You bring up an interesting point concerning how Chief actually deals with a custom countertop in conjunction with an existing countertop defined in the cabinet DBX as the two interact with each other. I used the term cover up because the specs for the cabinet DBX countertop are applied to the custom top such as backsplash height and appliance/insertion height. It's like it's there but we just can't see it. I'm just theorizing here but I believe the two are there and what you see is determined by the overlapping. Can run a test to see, extend a custom counter top across three cabinets, then for the center cabinet increase the height of the cabinet DBX counter top height say 2" greater than the custom top. Does it project through? If so can one be a different material than the other. If so then it seems that they coexist. Will try this later today. Graham

Here's another one. ASUS ZENBOOK™ UX303LN

I think you have the counter top height in the cabinet DBX set to zero. Change it back to 1 1/2" and set the cabinet box height as if it would be with the counter top included. The appliances are positioned according to the box height + the counter height in the Cabinet DBX. Your custom counter will still be correct as it will just cover over the underlying cabinet one. Graham

If 13", thin & fast is the main criteria then something like the Carbon X1, Dell XPS 13 or HP Spectra x360 would be good choices. If Lenovo is your preferred brand then the T450s will out perform the Carbon X1 by about 20%. All are available with I7 processors. They all use integrated graphics. They just can't fit a decent discrete card in this size of notebook. Raytraces will be fine as this uses the main CPU. If you only run camera views in vector mode without line smoothing then you should have no real problems with 2D & 3D Chief camera manipulations. You do mention that at the office you use a dock with your Vaio. This has a dedicated graphics card which likely helps when running the external monitor. However, you may find that the new systems you are looking at with the higher level of integrated graphic chips may perform quite well against the older AMD graphics board in your dock. Also, if you can wait a bit Intel has just launched the 5th gen core chips with 6200 Iris graphics. http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/02/intel-core-cpus-iris-6200-graphics/ Here is a link to a site that does a fairly extensive evaluation on laptops. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Ultrabook-Review.138033.0.html Graham

I am going to be very specific in my response. If you are just comparing the two processors and only working in Chief without running a demanding Raytrace then I doubt if you would be able to detect a difference. Technically the Quad core is faster but unless you are pushing your system it is unlikely that it would be noticeable. The two systems you mention are quite different. The Carbon is thin, light and has great battery life. The G51 is more of a gaming type machine and is heavier, thicker, lower battery life but on the other hand it offers a discrete graphics card. What notebook do you currently have? It may be easier to know this and if it is already doing things to your satisfaction and then base your comparisons against this to gain a better perspective of which type of system would better meet your needs. Graham

You should definitely explore the Wall Material Regions Tool. It will automatically generate the Polyline Solid for the clicked on wall. As Perry hinted in the above, the Material Region acts just like the underlying wall surface and will automatically respect & wrap around opens such as doors and windows. You can edit it if required just like any other Polyline Solid. Also, you can use this in both elevation and camera views. There is on for walls (vertical surfaces) and another for floors (horizontal surfaces). As their origin is based upon the underlying surface they will automatically adjust forward according to the material thickness you set. Here's another great advantage, directional/ patterned textures will blend properly and maintain their orientation regardless of width X height sizing. Graham

Checkout the discussion here. I believe this is might be what you are looking for. https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/4980-use-psolids-for-areas-with-macros/ Graham

Thanks to everyone for posting their results. Even with only 4 reporting there appears to be some general conclusions that can be drawn from these results. If others would post their findings I would build a spreadsheet with the results and post. Could be extremely useful when trying to figure out an upgrade strategy or to identify if your current configuration is performing as one would expect. If you need to baseline your Raytracing just turn off all of the lights. This will be about as fast as you will ever get for a given scene. Textures on their own have minimal impact when there are no light/shadow effects. For those with high core counts. I am not sure exactly how the Core/Threading in Chief is written/optimized and as such you could find that some lower core count systems (say 8 versus 12) will deliver almost identical results. From my reading up on this it can be a bit erroneous to assume that one will obtain a lineal improvement as one increases the number of cores. Double the cores does not mean double the performance. For those with true dual processor systems it would be very interesting to see the impact if one of the processors was disengaged. Hope to see more result postings, Graham

The Wall Material Region could also be used where the wall spans several rooms. An alternative to breaking the wall. If you wished to show the stages of finishing Wall Material Regions can be applied on top of each, say one for primer then another for finish paint. You could peel back a portion of the one on top to expose the next underlying one for specification purposes. Graham

Nice clarification Dermont. The other method we have not addressed is using the Material Regions tool. Graham

Although the topic was originally addressing processor cores, it has also resulted in a lot of rendering discussions and testing. You may find this helpful, especially from the mid point onward. https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/4962-processor-core-usage-in-chief/

Made a mistake above. Select Wall Coverings as Jeff stated. I was really just trying to emphasize that to select an individual wall section you need to be in plan view. Not sure if there is a method to select individual wall sections in elevation or camera views, you end up with the Room DBX which is more global like. Can't remember but I seem to recall that once the wall covering has been changed by the Wall Covering method you can then use the paint can for future changes. Graham

In your plan view right click on the "wall" section you want. Open Object, Materials - you can assign the material finish there. Graham

The missing texture file will not create any problems. I got these from the forum. Here it is. Thanks Kirk for sharing. S.Steel_Metal_Material_Kirk.calibz

I was not attempting to fix the actual plan. Just wanted to demonstrate that low angle wall sections will connect properly. The length and desired angles can be set in the wall DBX to suit. Graham

Scott - You've identified correctly the techniques I used. Point lights, those vanity wall sconces, require a bit of playing around with to create a similar look without actually having them set as a point light. Just changing them to a spot light will not be good enough. In this example I just turned them off. Increase the glass luminance to make it look light and then aimed a 3d light directly at each one to make the wall behind appear brighter. It's important to turn the shadows off on these so you do not get the sconce shadow showing up from the front facing light source. You can then adjust the 3D lights drop off rate and beam angle to get the desired amount of glow behind the sconce. Given the speed of rendering you are now achieving you can now play around with different settings and see the effect usually with no more than 3 passes. That's only about 30 seconds and you will know the effect. Beats waiting an 20 minutes or more only to find out you need to make more changes. Graham

Looks like you are well on your way to happy Raytrace times. 10 passes in 1 minute and 48 seconds. Best I could do was about 9 minutes for the same scene and settings. Also, what this exercise has demonstrated is the significant difference that light settings can have on Raytrace times. For your system the original plan with all the lights on and those point lights it took about 1 hour & 45 minutes for 10 passes. By just shutting off non scene relevant lights and changing the points to spots you dropped your Raytrace time down below 2 minutes for the same number of passes. Now the real question is what are you going to do with all of that freed time. Graham

Scott - Here's the Riverstone plan with my camera settings. Just open the bathroom camera (identified in red) and run a Raytrace. The Raytrace is set to run 10 passes. After you can adjust the intensity, contrast, saturation, etc. Also recommend you try the suggestions provided above by Jon. He has a lot of experience with this and from the posted images from him that I have seen it really shows. Graham Riverstone_Abode.zip

Should be ok now. Abode 15026.zip