Chrisb222

Might reveal the crazy workarounds they had to employ to get the model to work. Just kidding but it does remind me of how someone once mentioned that the Chief videos never encounter any difficulties...

For a ray trace, open the final image in Photoshop or a free image editor (I use GIMP as it's open source), select the gray background with a magic wand, delete it and save/export as .png

Pony wall would work.

Well stated.

Cool. Please report your results and impressions of the experience. Thanks.

Well I'm pretty proud that my little Mac Mini is running with the big dog$. $700, quiet as a mouse, and not much bigger. Can't PBR but I prefer RT anyway. Yeah, I'm happy...

No. Everything I do in plan view causes my computer to hang for 2-4 seconds.

That's the thing. Eric DOES give positive, meaningful feedback on questions. More than anyone else I've seen on this forum. And yes, the answer to the OP's question is easily discovered with just a smidge of personal effort at self-help.

For myself I'm very happy with my humble little $700 Mac Mini with onboard CPU graphics. PBR would be the only justification for anything more powerful, unless you need muscle for huge projects. I only design single family homes and almost never experience any lag.

In response to the part I bolded, an alternative would be for CA to utilize more of the resources available, at least according to the findings of this study. In regards to anecdotal experiences, I can attest that onboard CPU graphics are not capable of producing PBRs. At all. I thought about upgrading my system just to produce PBRs but I actually prefer ray tracing and have adapted to the new RT requirements fairly well. After seeing this study I'm glad I didn't because my puny Mac Mini 2014 with Iris CPU graphics actually runs X11 at a very pleasant speed, and drives two 24" monitors perfectly... as long as I don't try to PBR. Seems that for my purposes a more powerful system would be a waste of money.

Yeah it became a thing shortly after the internet was born. I think it applies more to text such as this forum where writing is a substitute for speaking to each other face to face. Contracts and other forms of writing probably don't have the same "rules," for instance I use caps almost exclusively on construction documents, but all caps = shouting is definitely a thing among discussion forums.

Well said! Go back and read the OP, all caps and worded to sound very demanding. I grin sometimes at some of the questions that are asked because it's apparent that the person made no effort whatsoever to find the answer on their own. I exhaust everything I can get my hands on, using every technique I can imagine to try and solve my problem before asking here. Even then, sometimes I just live with the problem instead of bothering other users with my issue. Not to say that I don't post questions, because I do, I just view this forum as a last resort and try not to bother people with my problems. And I always try to express thanks for the help I receive. I'm very grateful for those who are here who help me with the things that I really need figured out. Eric is certainly one of the most willing, generous, and helpful people here.

Not sure if this is what you're after, but to get a site survey perfectly parallel to a house, once I have the survey drawn (imported in your case) I select the line I want to be parallel to the house, open it, highlight and copy its angle, then select the entire survey, open transform/replicate, and paste that angle into the angle command. Sometimes I have to rotate the survey 90° one way or the other, but this method aligns them perfectly.

This is mostly true. It doesn't "blend" colors, i.e., blending yellow color into a blue material does not make the material green, it makes it yellow. But in the most literal sense it does not "replace all other color values with the color picked" either. There is some blending going on. The hues of the existing values are changed to match the hue of the color picked, while the values remain relatively unchanged. Color value refers to the color's relative darkness and lightness. These relative values are not changed. Hue refers to the place on the color spectrum, red, green, etc. The color picked determines the hue of the new blended material. The "blending" that happens is the new hue being blended with the previous values, modifying the material to have the same distinct shading but a different "color." It's a great tool that allows us to create a material that possesses the shading characteristics of the source material but with a different color, as opposed to wiping out the shading definition and just ending up with a flat color. But it could be made much better if it didn't always completely erase the variety of hues. Some textures, stone for example, may comprise a variety of hues, which when "blended" are all mapped to the single hue of the picked color. At times I want to make something just a little "browner" or "redder" without losing the variety of hues in the texture, and without going into Photoshop or another image editor and making a new texture file. It would be nice if there was an option to shift the color of all hues without mapping them all to the one new hue. (Suggestion time?) Finally, the existence of such multi-hued textures is why all textures are not just grayscale value maps with a single color hue applied.

Right, I'm aware of those methods, thanks. Would be nice to create my own drop-down though. I have custom configs now but with user-defined drop-downs, much more could be accomplished in one toolbar, without taking much screen space. Time for a Suggestion.

Do we have the ability to add a user-defined drop-down to contain our library item buttons? I could get all kinds of custom content on my toolbar if we could do that, but I don't want to clutter it up with a bunch of single buttons...

Wow, that's what I call whipping this program into submission! Nice work, thanks for sharing your technique.

You can say that again. Even if you don't need assistance, just reading what others are talking about is a gold mine of great tips and techniques.

All the textures from chief shown here look like barn metal to me. There was a link on page one to some decent standing seam textures, but like Joe said, they're all just flat pictures and will never look like true 3D. A decent fake? Yeah, depending on viewing angle and need for accuracy.

Good point, "Fencing" wouldn't be a great way to create a wall like that on sloping terrain. They're also available on the main "Build" menu.

Don't you mean Newels/Posts? Nice work.

Anyone here would just be guessing what your local building department requires. Why not ask them?

Maximum difference between riser heights is 3/8". Same for tread depths.

That's a shed roof where I come from, but we also don't wear shoes. Mono pitch sounds positively snooty.

As with many other weak texture files in Chief (shingles are about the worst), there are tons of better, free textures online. Just do a search. Look for "seamless" they're, well... seamless.