jtcapa1

I've had this problem about 3 times a year. Just often enough to forget the solution. Mainly because it is not real obvious, although logical if you are a power user. In a rush to change exterior wall textures, I will use the camera-paint option (bad). Or I will use the rainbow tool and force a change for that wall type (semi-bad) or I will open that walls specification dialog box and monkey around with the texture (semi-bad). All of these tend to "uncheck" a very important box, nested down inside the default settings. Then the problems appear when you want to make more changes. So I call SAS staff to get the answer and I wanted to publish the steps here for others and myself, when I forget again. - Support Answer - Luke M Friday, Jul 28, 2023 - 04:32 PM PDT Hi John, Thanks for attaching the plan so I could take a closer look. I believe I found the issue, and it is in fact related to a check box that I just had forgotten about while we were on the phone. Here's the fix: 1. Open Default Settings, expand Walls, select Exterior Wall, and click Edit. 2. Select the Materials panel, select the Exterior Wall Surface component, and click Select Material. 3. At the bottom of the Select Material dialog, check the Use default material box, then click OK, OK, Done to return to plan view. 4. Open a camera view, then go to the 3D menu and select Material Painter > Material Painter. 5. 3. At the bottom of the Select Material dialog, check the Use default material box, then click OK. 6. In the bottom edit toolbar on the left, make sure Material Painter Plan Mode is selected. 7. Click on one of the exterior walls (this will replace the material with the default material for all of the walls. At this point, you should now be able to change the wall type for any wall in your plan (as well as newly drawn walls), and that change will reflect in camera views. Presto-Chango, Bob's your Uncle, and it is fixed. :-)

No. It was a DEC mini, but we did have some calcomp components. What we liked was the whopping 10mb bernoulli removable drive.

AI is moving at breakneck speed, just like skynet, but in this case it would be a real money and time saver if you could get AI to link with CA and draft over a PDF plan set, taking a 2d set and making a 3d model. Can we have that please? Then you can launch nuclear weapons and wipe out all humans. On a side note, as I spend hours drafting over my latest PDF plan set, I'm noticing how much more information we now have to provide in our permit packages. Compared to the 10 year old PDF 2d plan sets I import, I'm shocked at how little information we provided. Especially with contractor sets. Less was truly more.

It was a loooong time ago Joe, and I did not double check the dates with Google. I only remember I had recently graduated from Architecture school full of bright new idea's. I do remember the goofy IBM PC and a Heath Zenith user built PC, I also remember those amazing floppy disks and drives. Only reason we had it was the Heath/Zenith user club met in our office up in Alaska, so we had these funny nerds gathering and nerding out on the new operating systems like HDOS and CP/M, then the various cards they could get for adding memory or floppy drives. I only wish I had listened to those nerds and invested all my money in the recent OS startup called MicroSoft. These nerds seemed to think it was inferior to their favorites OS. I don't think any of them became super rich. It was a crazy and amazing time for early adopters of CAD. We instead, invested in a mini-computer workstation for about $70,000. It worked great but only lasted about 4 years before we switched back to Autocad.

Well this is good to know. Your panos look great from inside or outside, but it is still a lot of work for little reward. Like trying to do a maximum bench press. Might impress a few people looking on, but less so as they call 911 when you blow out your shoulder.

Being in sales, design and production, time was valuable and I remember the older Architects in our office making a pronouncement after looking over my shoulder at ACAD version 1; "it will never go any where..." ;-) I thought so too at the time, as personal computers were still just a novelty, not destine to go any where either.

Do you have a video showing how to do that?

I'd like to do custom on-site client specific panoramic backdrops for each project. But, I'm not sure what are the best settings or method for capturing a good 360 shot on-site. Anybody do this? Can you share your tips and tricks?

Hey Rene, Those full backdrops are wonderful, and I'd like to know how we can take those pictures ourselves? When I do a site visit, I've always taken pictures of the Front, Back, Sides, and view to use in CA, but they are not the surround kind. What do I need to know when trying to take a panorama on site??

As another older user who started on Autocad 1.0 waaaay back in 1981?, I got used to working with it using the tools which kept getting updated at a furious pace, much like CA. I applaud you in making this change to CA and trying to pound into your worn out bag of new tricks, a better and faster way to get your projects finalized. The older I get the harder it is for me to keep emptying out my old bag on tricks, and stuff new ones inside. Like most old dog's, I get used to working this program in previously learned ways. So I feel inspired to see people like me (older, former, ACAD users) take on learning something new. Everything they are saying here makes sense, and is worth trying to work into my own workflow.

So where is your fancy 3d mouse Rene?

The Atlas OS is touted by LTT's as a great way to speed up your system for 'gaming', and CA's PBR kind of falls into that arena. Has anybody tried running Atlas stripped down OS yet? It is scary with all the security and updates turned off, but I like where they are going with this freeware program. Might try it on my home computer first, which is a basic older system that is slowing down with all the Windows 10 bloatware. Thoughts or comments?

Wow, that is a lot of visual space! Do you need to adjust your font sizes so you can read all the menu's?

Can you post a screen shot of Chief running on that one? Seems like having 38" would stretch things, but you also have two flanking monitors. I've got a 55" 4k monitor on my standing desk, so I rotate sitting and standing every hour. I do like not having to strain to see details. I'm going to have to rethink my setup now.

Rene, what is with the tetris wall decoration? Love seeing everyone's setup. Now I don't feel so odd with my 4 monitors taking up my whole office

I would not want to work in the tropics for the reasons your explaining. I made the mistake of taking my work laptop to Hawaii once, never thinking about those nice cool trade windows blowing into our ocean front condo. My laptop died after about 3 days!. Local repair shop smirked and said he see's this all the time. So water cool everything sounds smart when you live in paradise.

I want to rant a bit here, so forgive me. But every f**king time I watch one of those youtube influencers on computers, I go down this time consuming black hole of bright and shiny bigger, better and faster tech slides. All I really want to know at any one point in time is 'what is the best CA rig I could afford to buy' and why. All the other crazy information out there is really geared towards gamers, who don't really care about RT, that they call 'eye-candy', where as we do. We don't care about FPS until we are doing a PBR walk-thru. We now should care less about the CPU and more about the communication pathways between the CPU+GPU+RAM+M.2 NVME and the MB pathways. I may be wrong but I think that is what the coders at CA are looking at also. It is way to easy to overspend on crap we really don't need, like water cooling, or pretty cases with side panels to show off all the RGB lights inside. Rant done...

It is a little frustrating to read threads like these and see a bunch of comments which focus on parts and pieces instead of systems. The best advice from a cost perspective is get a good graphics card and us PBR instead of CPU RT. All the threads and cores of the 13900 series of CPU's are costly overkill for 99% of what we do. Not worth the money in a custom build. Right now, for CA users, it seems like the money is better spend on a high end graphics card. Barton, another good test is to launch task manager and just look at what the CPU is doing between the i7 cheap CPU and the i9 overpriced CPU. Is all that money worth the extra 2 minutes you save? On island time?

Like most people here, I've ditched the measuring tape for a Laser measuring device several years ago. I even tried the bluetooth link to CA for a bit, but it was still too buggy for my limited skill set. Now with the advent of advanced Laser Measuring devices that can generate point cloud data, I'm real curious if many, or anybody here has gone down this road and what their experience has been in the conversion process? As I age, and during Covid, I'm less and less inclined to measure up my clients homes, so I'm always looking for a faster, and accurate solution that is still affordable. The technology is improving pretty fast with companies like NavVis and, I don't want to get left behind. So where are we at with Chief Architect and the point cloud conversions? I suspect that most of the conversions will soon be automated with the advances in AI, which might also complete the design for us!

This is an older thread, but I've resisted Windows 11 until now. I'm planning to install it on a separate SSD just to be safe, but I'm wondering if all the issues have now been worked out with the Nvida RTX30 series cards?

Wow. That is a fantastic job of using that tedious tool Rich. Beautiful front facade. Way to think way outside the box.

But it would be nice for those of us sitting on the fence with using a space mouse if we could see a perspective where and expert is manipulating a model, using custom keys and show the screen at the same time as the hand motion. Similar to this well done video: 3D Mouse Review

Is there any chance one of you experienced users could post a video of how you use this fancy 3d mouse thingy? I'm ready to pull the trigger, but I'm uncertain about how it would work with the opposite hand as the mouse. It would be nice to see how you use it with CA, especially with custom buttons. I've seen Rene's video's where he uses one, but his are very custom and a bit confusing unless you can stand near and watch the hands and the screen.

Thank you. That is what I was looking for. I do understand the liability issue, but I'm not concerned in this case. Plus I can over design it.

Do any of you guys do your own structural engineering? If so, what programs do you recommend? I learned to do it by hand over 40 years ago, but have always relied on professional structural engineers to do my lateral shear loads. I'm in a bind with one client that cannot way the months it will take to get it engineered. I remember seeing some kind of program online that was simpler looking than the 'Wood Works" program my engineer likes to use.