johnny

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but what would be awesome if this same edit function of instances worked with Architectural Blocks. Then, what would REALLY excite me is if Chief allowed walls, doors, windows, stairs, and roof planes to be added to an Architectural Block (basically any 3d item).

With respect, why not just set the line weights to something correct? Between posting this and going back and forth it would have taken 5-10 seconds to just change all the lines to a thickness you might like. You can even create custom scale sets (layerset/annoset) with whatever line thicknesses you want at certain scales.

The variation in light/dark your seeing in Chief may be the same variations that could occur in real life without looking right at the material with camera lighting (in your 1st pic). To me they look identical....again, outside the variation you'd expect to see dependent on lighting. If you do artificially lighten the material, and its going to be that sensitive to the client, you might actually represent the wrong tone once its placed in the actual kitchen.

What I like too about this idea is not having to mess with pony walls if you simply want to change a material type from floor to floor.

OK, I think I got it...close anyways. To clarify, do I need to draw the site plan PL so they are fixed to the X/Y space and THEN rotate to how its suppose to be on the site plan related to N? So I'm not rotating the plan to match the site plan but the site plan to match the true N orientation?

Thank you Michael - I'm trying to follow this but when I right click on plan view in the project browser I see nothing about rotating the plan. Has this changed in X14?

Thank you! Will try.

I'm curious what people are doing for site plans that are incorporated into the model plan files - in which the property lines are square to N. I typically do my site plans in a separate file, but i'm dealing with an HOA that wants all sorts of modeled diagrams to show compliance with their CC&Rs. However, as most know, its far better to model in Chief keeping right angles. Are you guys just rotating the site plan to keep the house file square to X/Y? ...then rotate back in Layout to actual N orientation?

I have my backdrop in camera's set to white - but when I go into PBR it automatically uses a grey. Does anyone know a way to remove the grey backdrop for PBR?

Great addition to CA though.

Vectorworks can open these types of files - but i'm not exactly sure what i'd save it back into in order to get to CA that is usable. I'm all for trying to help if you can think of what I would export to. My guess it it would have too many faces and artifacts for something other than the native file type.

Hey Ryan - nice to hear from you too. That is very good to know. I really don't use RayTrace so its not a huge deal. I am more glad to know PBR works.

Does anyone with experience mind if I ask how Chief is running on the Apple M-chips? Can you do physically based views yet? Rendering? Overall speed? Thanks in advance.

...or to further glenn's general idea I'd just use 3d modeling polys and add the brick course(s) as you want with offsets. If you do it that way it would even kinda show properly in cross sections.

Thank you Dermot. Out of curiosity, does Chief know why the earlier the beta the faster the app? I find current x14 about the same as final x13, but I always notice a much faster early version of each release that gets slower as the app reaches full version. Maybe there is a good reason for this - but its a shame we can't keep the speed of the early versions of the app.

Thanks Ryan - that is true.

I happen to have an engineer on staff lic in WA, OR, ID, and a few other states with time right now to jump on something. Jared - give me a call. I can get a home out in 24 hrs.

I use a lot of software - and it hasn't happened one time other than Chief. How do you set the TdrLevel tp 0?

But out of curiosity are you having that with files FULLY originating from a X13 template? I have it happen a lot with files started pre-X13 but not once with post-x13.

This isn't only a Windows 11 issue - i first started having these issues in Windows 10, and in fact moving to Windows 11 helped initially. Now, its happening again. I have a 3090. I have noticed inconsistency where if I don't have an option (greyed out) for Physically Based Render the crash won't happen. When Physically Based Render is an option on the render I have a high likelihood of a crash....and I've also noticed it happens to me only on files or templates started pre-X13. I've not had the crash happen (to me) in files originated 100% in X13.

Yep, I've put Chief in there and set it to use the "High Performance" but there isn't any difference. Are you using Windows 11?

Yeah, I've made sure that all the settings for this is correct, and even inside Chief it shows the 3080 being used. However, I know its not being used. Even in the most basic Standard mode is painfully slow. Are you using Windows 11?

So i bought a new laptop for presenting models to clients out of office - it has a RTX 3080 dedicated video card/chip. When I got the laptop it had Windows 10 installed - i operated for a bit in that and everything worked fine. I then upgraded to Window 11. Since that time, and even though i updated all my drivers for the video card, Chief (and only Chief) doesn't seem to be using the dedicated video card....rather the integrated graphics chip in the system. Anyone else having a similar issue - or know how to fix this?

This is about the best I could do with Chief's tools and that drawing. Respectfully, the design of the "revised" version isn't very good (design wise). Window seizes are all over the board, scale of some of the elements aren't great. The example you show in images is obviously done by a professional whereas the Chief file version was amateurish. concept_building.pdf

I think the key for Chief, as it relates to commercial (like your example), is it can make quick presentation work but so much of the plan is "falsified" CONDocs will be an issue (unless you want to do a ton of CAD work). Commercial windows/doors, structural elements/connections, cladding, elevators, and other aspects in Chief would be an issue. I'm not saying it can't be done in Chief - but you'd end up spending WAY more time in inefficiencies and prone to a lot more mistakes. Lastly, Chief starts to bog down with some homes we do...and I feel it would absolutely choke on a true BIM 3D commercial building.