Doug_Park

On my laptop which has a very high DPI I couldn't see the pattern lines unless I zoomed way in because they are very thin and not very distinct from the very dark fill color. I bumped the pattern line weight up and they showed up a bit better but the dark on dark color is really hard to see. Try changing the pattern line color to something more distinctive and see if that helps.

It is possibly a preference setting difference between X6 and X7. Compare your preferences for Undo. Compare the 2D Zooming and Panning Optimizations preference setting as well.

My guess is along the lines of what others are saying. 1) Your outer wall layer is very thin and so you are getting some sort of Z-Fighting problem. 2) Your model is located a long way from (0, 0) x and y coordinates leading to a numeric precision problem in 3D that causes a similar problem to Z fighting. 3) Some sort of video card hardware/driver problem. This is probably not the issue, but I mention it to be complete. When we compute the lines for the layout we use double precision numbers and an algorithm that will pull the lines forward if they are some how covered up by surfaces in front. In order to get even halfway reasonable performance in OpenGL we are required to use single precision numbers which can result in a lot of odd things under certain circumstances. A good rule of thumb is to keep your model as near 0,0 as you can. If you get out about 1 mile or so from the origin all sorts of weird things begin to happen to the 3D. Similarly, if you have very thin layers in your walls you can get some weird issues like what you are describing. Of course this is all speculation. It would be a lot easier to diagnose with the actual plan to look at.

It looks like a bug. File a report with our support team.

We are aware of a crash with Intel, but that should not crash. We want to get that fixed. It would be nice to let our support team know what your hardware configuration is so that we can try to verify that our fixes to the problem work on your hardware.

Draw one. Drop a point at the center. Switch to copy/rotate about current point. Switch to multiple copy. Set interval and then use the rotate handle. Or use the transform replicate dialog after dropping the center point, specify number of copies, rotation angle, and select rotate about current point.

I've heard mixed feedback on the efficiency gains of using docked layer display options dialog. Some feel it is a big productivity boost, others not so much. The way some people use layers they don't change them very often so they would not get much of a gain. Others change them a lot so it would be a big gain. I'm not saying that one method is better than the other, but there would be a definite perceptual difference in how useful this dialog would be depending on how you work. It is certainly a nice feature if you are in the habit of changing the display properties of layers a lot or turning them on/off a lot. But if you use layer sets to turn things on and off then your work flow is probably not going have as much of a productivity gain.

For vector views sent to layout the graphics card has nothing to do with the quality. We have a custom algorithm for converting the 3D drawing into a line drawing that doesn't use the video card. Although in theory we could use the video card to speed it up, but that should also in theory have no effect on the resulting quality. Possibly the biggest need with quality is to have a high resolution output, which can be achieved in X7 using the Export Picture option.

I would consider a 4K display for the case you are talking about, although I'm not sure how good chrome cast is at handling those resolutions.

I have pointed this thread out to the person that has the authority to make a change in our policy. I would encourage calling our sales team to talk about your options as they are better equipped to explain our policy. However, I would ask that you wait until Monday as many of them are traveling back from the IBS/KBIS trade show today so we are light on staff at the moment.

Please send us the plan. That doesn't sound like a problem that is common so there is probably something about your plan that is unique. It may also be a video card issue so make sure you let us know what your hardware is.

Sorry to hear about your health issues Lew. I hope that things get better for you. Our policy remains the same as it was last time. It is unfortunate that the timing of this release caught up with you this time around.

Just realize that the files go only one way. So anything you modify in X7 won't be editable in X6.

I use copy/paste to enter the CD Key so that my lack of precise typing skills doesn't come into play. I also copied it and sent it to myself in an e-mail so that I wouldn't lose it. Also did the same with the old key.

This release should be really solid. However, there does exist the probability that in some obscure cases a problem may exist. If you don't feel comfortable you can wait. But there is no reason why you can't install it and continue to use X6 for your production work while you look over the new features of X7. At the very least you would have jump on learning the new features for when it is officially released. Of course we want as much feedback as we can get so if you find any issues please report them. The sooner we find them the sooner they can get fixed. As with any software of a complex nature like Chief, how an individual uses it varies. It is likely that a problem that you might encounter will not be encountered by someone else that is in a position to report it. So finding an issue now and reporting it is a good way of making the software better for you. We like feedback. At this stage every problem that you can find is valuable and will help to make the program better.

Clever.

The size of a plan on disk and how fast it draws or how much memory it takes are often not correlated. We don't save the patterns to disk we generate them on the fly when they are needed. Also, certain image file formats, such as JPG or PNG are highly compressed on disk but must be uncompressed when they are drawn so can take up a lot more memory than you would expect. In this case a pattern, the stone pattern, is accounting for at least several hundred thousand lines that are generated and sent to the video card to display. The video card does a good job of displaying them quickly. However, all the lines are generated, even the ones that are not visible in the scene. The video card is given the job of deciding how to display them. The pattern spacing is settable in material properties.

Each part of a pattern takes up the same amount of space. So a busy pattern like a stone pattern will take up a lot more space than something like a lap siding or cross hatch pattern. In addition in 3D the lines are broken up at the boundaries of each face which further increases the number of lines. So a pattern on a curved surface which is broken up into many small faces would be much more costly than one on a flat surface. We try to put pattern lines into video card memory but if we run out of memory then we have to draw them differently. Turning off patterns will keep you from having to generate them. They are not generated in views that don't display them. so if you are working with a plan that has a lot of pattern lines you can get significant performance improvement by turning them off. This is an area of Chief that we could potentially improve a lot. We have done a lot of optimization in the drawing of these over the years, but there are still things that could be done. A line uses 2 points in space while a triangle uses 3. There are additional bits of information such as the fill texture that is attached to a face. But you can think of each line as taking up nearly the same amount of memory as each face. Given that a single face may have several pattern lines, you can see how this could result in a lot of memory usage.

The optimizations are likely turning off because you are running out of video card memory. So a card with more memory is likely a good solution. Pattern lines would likely be what is eating up the memory. As far as the ultimate desktop goes, I would look at dual Xeons with as many cores as you can afford. This would be the best option for ray tracing. But it all depends on your budget. Also make sure you put the fastest memory in that you can. I would also put in at least a 512GB SSD to install the OS on. Then toss in a larger disk for storing content and for having a good backup.

The extra stone wall layer is one issue. I also changed the stone pattern to be 48" instead of 12" which cuts the number of lines required. This made the performance about 10-15 seconds to regenerate on my machine. I'm not sure if this works for you or not. Also, if you turn off line weights you won't need to regenerate in 3D when you zoom in and out. This plan uses more than 2GB of memory with all the lines so if you are running the 32 bit version of Chief it will crash when it runs out of memory. With my changes the memory required was less than 2GB. It is a big plan and with the many pattern lines it will push the limits of any system. I don't think you could buy a system that would be fast enough given the way we currently generate lines. Once the 3D was up I was getting rotation and zooming in less than .2 seconds which is close to being reasonable.

The door problem is one that could be fixed by fixing the original model of the door. The muntins are modeled poorly by us. They need an overhaul. The way we model them is as single surface strips that intersect each other at the middle. Which is really far from correct. They really should be built as a molding that can either be between the glass panes or extend inside and outside of them. That of course would add a lot of surfaces to the model so may be a performance issue. The wall issue is one we saw from time to time in the past, but shouldn't occur if the walls are vertically aligned. If you have a case that reproduces the problem send the plan in to our support team.

I think Ryan nailed it. I've seen cases like this before, sometimes in 2D, where a pattern is so dense that the result appears as solid. My guess is that you have a material definition somewhere with an exceptionally small pattern line spacing. Another possibility is an inserted object with a dense pattern and an exceptionally high surface count. More than likely that item could be changed to have a less dense pattern or none. A faster GPU is not going to help with the part that is slow as that is done entirely on the CPU. What I would do is systematically look for the offending bit. My first suggestion is to open the materials dialog and arrow through each material until you find one that has a very dense pattern. It will probably also take a bit longer to display as well. Then it should just be a matter of editing that material to have a less dense pattern. If that doesn't work you could turn off layers systematically to narrow your search. Another method is to delete half the model using Edit Area. Then do an overview. If it is fast you now know that it is in the half you deleted. You can continue doing this until you narrow it down. Just make sure that you don't save over your original plan while you are doing this.

If nothing is displaying in 2D, but you have things in 3D then the 2D is still there. The question is why is nothing displaying. Possibilities: 1) Layers are turned off in 2D. 2) Something large and the same color as the background is being drawn in front of everything else. Doing a click to select the item, assuming it isn't on a locked layer, should be all you would need to do. Select all could be used as well, but you don't want to hit delete at that point as it would likely delete a lot more than you want. 3) You are positioned way far away from the middle of your plan or you are zoomed way in. Fill screen should fix this, you might have to hit it several times before you get back to a reasonable scale. Another way to check is to do a select all, if you see a single selection handle then zoom in on that location. 4) 2D drawing is not working at all. This might happen if your system has somehow run out of GDI resources, but you should be experiencing many other problems at that point. It might also happen if you are running low on system memory. In either case a reboot of your system could help. It might be something else, but I can't think of anything at the moment. If you have a plan that reproduces the problem send it into our support team so that we can look into possible solutions.

Unless you have a reason to want the lines to scale proportional to your printed scale, which is a fairly unusual case, always select "Use Layout Line Scaling" in send to layout.

I'm not sure what is going on here, but we should get to the bottom of the problem. Please work with our support staff so that we can figure out what is happening.