pfschuyler

I'm closing up my operation and selling my license of X8 currently under SSA until December 16th 2016. Of course I'll discount the SSA renewal cost off my price, plus a further discount on the license itself. Please let me know if you're interested at pfschuyler@gmail.com. Everything is of course legit and verifiable through Chief Sales...its an easy way to save on a new license + get two free additional months on a new SSA.

If you have an HTC Vive as I do, try the AM Model Viewer ($10) on Steam. It accomplishes everything IrisVR's Prospect does at a fraction of the cost with no ongoing subscription fees. It imports *.dae files directly which is great as that's Chief's primary export format. One guy (I think) developed it. You get to examine the VR model on a desk, as in Prospect, then you can teleport inside it at 1:1 scale with full teleport and room scale VR complete with the Vive controllers. The graphics are not spectacular, but they're not stellar with IrisVR or InsightVR either. It will take some time before a shading model appears that is satisfying aesthetically (with rich global illumination) in VR. But even in its relatively simple state, it's amazing to walk around in your project with Roomscale VR, it's extremely useful to make real world design decisions.

Looking great, so far with X8. Here's a suggestion: Chief Architect's renderer is decent quality, but godawful slow relative to other rendering systems. That's just a fact, its the slowest renderer I've ever used. I have for example Lument RT on my system, which is a newer real time rendering system. Lumion is another real time system that is even better quality, but more expensive. For a comparison of time difference of both of these vs. Chief, I could produce a high-end 2.5 minute animation (HD, 4500 frames) with advanced lighting, plants, animated figures, cars, birds, and special effects with Global Illumination in about the same amount time that I can produce a single high res ray traced image from Chief. I'm not talking 2x as fast, quite realistically they are 100x faster. Both of these systems import files from Chief via DAE perfectly. The textures and everything else are perfect and intact. But there is no lighting information sent over as far as I can tell, which is a bummer. Both of these real time renderers can turn on night scenes automatically just by changing the time of day to dusk or night. The lighting information is there in the Chief models...I just wish that it exported via DAE or another format. One possible option...replace the obsolete 3DS format with FBX export, and include the lighting info in the files. Or just add it to DAE if that's possible. But opening the option to use 3rd party rendering systems is very worthwhile considering the time impact in Chief.

I'm getting my Chief Architect "legs" and there are two common elements I want to add to a typical full-height closet cabinet. 1.)Angled shelves for shoes. 2.)Hanger rods or pull-down rods. I realize I could add these elements as independent symbols and manually place them...but that's time consuming. Is there a way to add common items like these within the cabinet dialog box (for example a custom profile as a shelf option...which could solve both conditions)? Paul Schuyler

I'm a new Premier user, I'm happy overall with the software. One slight annoyance about the licensing however. Namely I use my Premier license on a desktop at my solo office, and at night and on the weekends at home...I'd like to use it on my laptop. This occurs pretty much every day and it important for me to leverage my time with small kids. I have no intention to try and use the software on more than one computer at any time. I know from the help manual that I can deactivate, or activate the program on a given computer and accomplish this through a specific procedure or via this online website. In general I really like this licensing system because if I upgrade my computer and swap out the hard drive, etc. I don't have these painful activation issues to deal with, its simple for major installs. However for more frequent on-off daily use on two different computers it can be a pain. Other software systems like Revit or Sketchup allow the simultaneous installation on a desktop and laptop for this purpose. Then when I'm at home and I wish to just do a fast furniture arrangement, for example...its no problem. I can drop files on a USB and go back and forth. I wish there were an accommodation for this in Chief or am I mistaken about the licensing scheme? Manually activating and deactivating will not work easily if I'm doing it 2x or more a day, every day...I have a feeling that will get problematic..... Thanks, Paul Schuyler