Real Time Ray Tracing Questions/Problems/Solutions

[kgschlosser]

OK for those that will comment about not filling out my signature I have tried to multiple times and when I click on the save button the page gets stuck in a loading loop. So I am not able to create a signature so here is my machine specs.

 

AMD 16 Core (32 Thread) ThreadRipper Pro @ 4.0Ghz

64 gb memory

1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD

Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 Video Card

Chief Architect x13

 

 

I have searched the forum and tried the things mentioned in those posts. I have also done the things in the tutorial videos.

 

So these are questions and if other are not experiencing the same thing then they are problems that need a solution. I have spent several days tinkering with settings and making adjustments but nothing seems to work.

 

The issue I am having is Chief is not using my video card to it's full potential. The most it uses is maybe 5-8% at any time even when doing a "Real time" Physically based 3D view. I am not sure as to why it is not using more of my video card. When I am in the  real time view  it is anything but real time. 10 minutes and I am still waiting for it to finish just a single frame. In the video tutorial on chiefs website the guy states "30 seconds on my laptop to render the frame".

 

I have all the lights turned of it is daytime, sun is set to use angle. and all other settings at default values. 5 minutes later it is still rendering. Bottom right says 2000 passes and I have not seen it say complete. The number of passes are set to 1000 in the camera options so I am not sure why it is still going at 2000. I enabled the logging for ray tracing and it doesn't tell you anything other then it finding a compatible video card sp that is of no use.

 

Is there something I am missing somewhere that needs to be set? I have used the settings found in the video tutorial to a T and it still takes forever and no where near the 30 seconds that is stated in the video.

 

[Renerabbitt]

2 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

 

 

Is there something I am missing somewhere that needs to be set? I have used the settings found in the video tutorial to a T and it still takes forever and no where near the 30 seconds that is stated in the video.

 

You are using the CPU raytrace, as opposed to the PBR Rendering technique with realtime raytracing

[kgschlosser]

Yeah I have that checked off.

 

I also have this issue

 

 

See the light coming from above the beams and below the beams? They are not lights I placed it is bleeding through from the sunlight outside. This same thing can be seen in night time from the interior lights. It comes right through the shingles in the middle of a roof plane where there would be no possibility of me not having something joined properly.

 

[kgschlosser]

Same image except after 200k passes.

 

You can still see white speckles on things. It took over 4 hour to get to this point in the rendering.

[MarkMc]

8 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

Same image except after 200k passes

As Rene Pointed out it sounds as if you are using CPU Ray Tracing NOT RTRT which is found under Physically Based.

I say that because you are referring to Passes. CPU RT uses passes, Real Time Ray traced show Samples That would also explain why your GPU is not getting used, it should hit 100% but will gradually drop off IF you have cap live samples checked.

First screen shots showing how you get into CPU ray trace

and what shows up once you start it.

Then while it's running this will be on top left of window.

At the bottom of screen CPU RT shows Passes.

 

Rene shows you where to get to Real Time Ray Tracing at bottom of your screen using RTRT you will see Samples

 

Once that is all sorted your other questions can be dealt with. For some of your questions there are threads that deal with improving either type of ray trace overall with some excellent guidelines. _always have a roof, always have a foundation, sometimes for the sake of just the render add a second floor, watch out for holes in the structure, polylines that go from the inside to the outside- there are other issues that it looks like you are running into that apply only to CPU ray trace (there is a thread a few years ago)

Might want to post the plan, or a stripped down version.

Also are you using Win 10 or 11 it matters.

 

[kgschlosser]

Samples is incorrect verbage used in Chief. The correct verbage is passes as is seen in the CPU ray tracing. Not sure why they didn't use the same verbage but they didn't. A sample would be an area of the rendering a pass is going over the rendering again adding/removing which is what is being done and you can see that is what it is doing when it is running.

 

So from now forward I will use the word samples because that is what is in chief.

 

I did state  that I have that boxed checked in a previous post. I attached images that show ray tracing is working, i understand how you would not know if a CPU rat trace made those images of the "Physically Based" 3D view did. However I did state that the Physically Based 3D often referred to as "real time" ray tracing is anything but real time that being stated means I am using the ray tracing that is seen in the Physically Based 3D view;

 

The numbers I have given are from what is seen in the status bar of the program (lower right hand corner).

 

It never says "Finished Rendering" in the bottom of the program window as is seen in any other 3D view. the number of  samples keeps on increasing until my monitor turns off. I do not have my computer go to sleep at all. I let it sit all last night but  the rendering started over again once i moved the mouse to turn the displays back on. I do have to say that is pretty silly especially if it takes more than a minute or so to do the rendering, A person is not able to walk away and come back later when it should be finished.

 

 

I have used my computer continually while the ray tracing was taking place. over 400,000 samples taken over something like 7 1/2 hours.  still have white speckles and it never completes.

No errors in the log and no popup errors and next to 0 GPU use while it is Ray tracing. Sometimes I manage top get 4 samples a second, most times I get 2 a second. That means to take 1000 samples it would take at best a little over 4 minutes to finish and at worst about 8.5 minutes. Problem is it never finishes and just keeps on collecting samples. It actually never finishes because you can see the areas where it hasn't

 

Also changes I make in the Rendering Technique Options dialog for Standard view effect the Physically Based view. not sure why because it is a completely different view. Changes I make to the Standard View do not effect other views. If you change the ambient lighting settings in Standard View this changes lighting setting in the Physically Based View. Now I could understand them doing that if not wanting to duplicate controls tho it is a HUGE annoyance to have to shift back and forth between views to change them. This is not the case tho because the Line drawing controls are available in both the Standard View and the Physically based view and change those settings in Standard view have no impact on the Physically based view.

 

Unless you have experience the Physically Based (Ray Tracing) view being horribly slow and never saying "Finished Rendering" on the bottom right you are not going to be able to help. In order to help you need to have had the problem and found out how to correct it. Making me repeat myself multiple times answering the same questions is a waste of time and frankly it's exceedingly annoying..

 

I am using the real time/physically based  ray tracing. I have stated that a number of times. so asking me about that box being checked off is a pointless question because if it wasn't would I be doing the kind of ray tracing mentioned above? No I would not because chief does not support real time/physically based ray tracing using the CPU does it? That check box only deals with illumination or lighting.

 

In the image below you can see the export samples set to 1000, you can also see the samples counter higher then 1000. This is a simple 4 walls and a roof  plan and it has nothing else. I am not sure how it is calculating the samples per second or how long each sample is taking but it is completely wrong.

 

 

Next 2 images so what the frame count is at the start and then what it is 30 seconds later. You can see the clock in the image.

 

 

first image = 1992 samples

 

 

second image = 4195 samples

 

 

 

That is 2,203 samples taken in 30 seconds.

 

2203 / 30000 ( one hundredth of a second or 0.01 seconds is a millisecond and there are 1000 of them to a second so there would be 30000 to 30 seconds. and low and behold it is not 0.01 seconds but 7 times slower at 0.07 seconds per frame. The time seen per sample doesn't even match the number of samples per second. It is showing 0.01 seconds per pass that would be 1000 passes per second. In this case the average is  close to 73.5 samples per second Now 1.5 samples per second may not seem like a lot  but apply that when it says 2 frames per second now you are only getting 1/2 a frame a second which means over 1000 frames the time just went from 8.33 seconds to 33+ minutes.

 

I bring this up because those numbers cannot be used a a way to determine the speed of it because it is grossly incorrect. I am talking from the real world  time it starts rendering until the real world time when the rendering is mostly complete because it appears to never finish which is seen in the rendering itself because it shows up as white dots as well as the fact that it never states "Finished Rendering" / the sample count never stops going up even tho it is set to 1000 max samples.

 

No errors anywhere, not in the logs and not in the program itself.

 

The plan is not out of this world big,  3000sqft 3 floors no terrain or landscaping, no plants, basic things like bed and nightstands kind of thing. Nothing complex. All lights turned off and I get 2 to 4 samples per second according to what is in chief architect but in reality is far slower.

 

look at the samples per second here.

 

There is nothing in that image that would cause the sample rate to be so slow.

 

Now look at this image

 

 

 why it is so slow no matter what is being rendered.

 

Here it is down to 2 a second, again nothing that is extremely crazy.

 

 

[kgschlosser]

IDK what else you need me to show you that shows I am using GPU rendering, it is in fact horribly slow. I am using a computer that is in the top 1% of the fastest PC's benchmarked. I am not using a crappy video card, one that is far faster then the one used in the tutorial video which has the guy stating after 30 seconds it is done.

 

Same rendering as the last image in the last post. now at 1000 samples and it is still running and white dots seen everywhere. I circled the dots in red

 

 

 

 

That took how long to render?

[kgschlosser]

I am using Windows 10.

 

[kgschlosser]

Here you can see the rendering is running and you can see what the GPU use is.

 

 

and  here you can see that my video card supports everything needed.

[MarkMc]

24 minutes ago, kgschlosser said:

I am not using a crappy video card, one that is far faster then the one used in the tutorial video

Well I thought they used a 3070 or 3080 in those but maybe not. Quadro 4000 comes out ahead of a 2060, behind 2070, 3060 and certainly 3070 and above. Sill should work if a tad slow. (or do I misunderstand what card?). I have no idea if the alleged AMD bottleneck applies to threadrippers or if it matters in Chief at all. Nothing to do about that at this point if it does though.

Link to 2070 comparison

I keep cap live samples checked and set export samples to around 1500 for general working Generally get good enough at that and avoid running the GPU constantly at 80-1000%. You said yours was not hitting that? In Windows-Graphic Settings do you have Chief set to high performance?

 At that many passes you should get good results. I'd look into lighting, light sets ( do you have ALL lights on?) ambient occlusion,sun (way too high in your image above), backdrop intensity...all the settings.

Renerrabbit has posted some useful tips you might look at. Or as suggested earlier post a stripped down plan with settings.

FWIW- arguing that our failure to understand the terms you choose instead of the vernacular of the progam is wrong because you thinks the program is wrong won't go far to finding a solution for you (and won't win a lot of points-just sayin)

[Renerabbitt]

On 4/10/2022 at 5:01 PM, kgschlosser said:

Bottom right says 2000 passes and I have not seen it say complete.

There is no such action for realtime raytracing, which is why we were all assuming you were using CPU based raytracing. You must File/Export/Picture to produce an image that follows a designated sample rate.
 

 

20 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

Yeah I have that checked off.

 

"off" was assumed to be no check mark, so I could see why Mark thought you were using CPU raytrace
 

 

20 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

See the light coming from above the beams and below the beams? They are not lights I placed it is bleeding through from the sunlight outside.

This is an undersampled area with not enough ambient or direct light. This is also typical behavior with 0" joints such as a case where no roof is present in this layerset.
 

 

1 hour ago, kgschlosser said:

Samples is incorrect verbage used in Chief. The correct verbage is passes as is seen in the CPU ray tracing. Not sure why they didn't use the same verbage but they didn't. A sample would be an area of the rendering a pass is going over the rendering again adding/removing which is what is being done and you can see that is what it is doing when it is running.

Sample rate is the correct terminology, as we are specifying the number of samples taken per pixel.
 

 

1 hour ago, kgschlosser said:

the number of  samples keeps on increasing until my monitor turns off

As intended, and you could cap this action by setting "Cap Live Samples" in PBR rendering technique options.

 

1 hour ago, kgschlosser said:

It never says "Finished Rendering"

As stated, please use File/Export/Picture, set your resolution and walk away.
 

 

1 hour ago, kgschlosser said:

still have white speckles and it never completes.

The Export function has some amount of nvidia or intel based denoising built into the export image. Maybe denoised 2 sample per pixel. This is not shown in live view. Keep in mind that "fireflies" are an indication of undersampled or underlit scenarios in most cases.

 

1 hour ago, kgschlosser said:

no direct lights to speak of and very little ambient light. this condition is very difficult to compute. This would take much longer to process then say a room with ample sources of light.
 

 

1 hour ago, kgschlosser said:

Because of caustics and refraction, you have a lot of glass and metal in frame

 

 

1 hour ago, kgschlosser said:

This is typical behavior of any rendering engine where the pixels sampled reach a level of accuracy that no longer require additional samples. Whats left is pixels that are difficult to process. (light and cuastics and refraction again)


Anywho, set your sample rate to 5K, export your image, walk away and come back in 5 minutes...or, provide more lighting, or less glass, or turn off refraction etc.



 

[Kbird1]

6 hours ago, MarkMc said:

Well I thought they used a 3070 or 3080 in those but maybe not.

 

I believe Scott H. had a 3060 12GB when he did the Videos...

 

6 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

Same rendering as the last image in the last post. now at 1000 samples and it is still running and white dots seen everywhere. I circled the dots in red

 

Generally I cap the samples at 2500 but with some materials 3500 or 5000 will look better eg some textured glass takes longer to get rid of the "Fireflies"

particularly if you don't have enough scene lighting. But even then if I look closely I can see that the drywall is still "pixelated" / not crisp..

              *I have my Standard View Lighting both set to 58% Chief's OOB 31% is far too low.....

 

M.

[kgschlosser]

Thank you @Renerabbittfor he plethora of useful information.

 

I have ZERO lights turn on so it's not that.

I have lowered all of the sunlight and ambient light settings doing this doesn't change the speed at all.

As far as the white pixels The program is going to know when there isn't enough information needed to process that pixel and it shouldn't make it white, it should grab and make a copy any pixel that is touching the one with no data. If the one that is next to it has no data then it moves onto the next. The only time it should stay white is when all 8 surrounding pixels have been tried and all of those pixels contain no information. So that is just bad programming I guess and nothing I can do about it. The surrounding pixels around the white ones have enough data to fill in properly so there is something wrong with the way the rendering is being done o the code that is used to do the rendering.

 

But here look at this. I put the NVIDIA overlay up. how Windows is reporting GPU use is incorrect. But I am still not using more than 50% of the GPU at any time. That is the highest I have seen it go to. In this image it is at 45% use and the sample  speed at a whopping 7 per second. It's not using the GPU properly plain and simple. This annoys me because I was running on x11 and brought up the speed of the ray tracing in that here on the forums. I was told that it all works in x13 and the GPU will be used to do the ray tracing. It's not using the whole GPU and it's using < 1% of the 32 logical processors my machine has.. The rendering in x13 is about as useful as the rendering in x11 and  now I am kicking myself for spending the money to purchase it.

 

 

 

 

 

I have a really stupid question. while chief isn't using my GPU to it's fullest potential it is not using my 32 logical processors at all. why would they not use every possible source of computing power available to the program for it to run? why does a program that is supposed to be so intensive not use the single biggest thing to it's advantage, SLI or CrossFire?? I can put 6 PCIe 4.0 x16 video cards in my machine if I wanted to and chief would only use one of them. how long has SLI and CrossFire been around now?

 

Gonna have to cut my losses using chief and move to using Revit or the like. not able to render and the software not using all of the available processing power to run means the company just wants to make minor bug fixes and changes but doesn't want to stay with the times. Rendering is not new technology and after making software for as many years as chief has been around and not have a way to render built into it  means they will never have a way to do it, well not one that works correctly anyhow. A software company that can't stay with the leading edge technology is a dying software company. Time to start learning something new I would rather get frustrated doing that then frustrated with trying to figure out how to get something to work correctly when it is handicapped by design and will more then likely never work correctly. If they cannot get it right in 10 years they never will.

 

 

 

 

 

[kgschlosser]

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/10251/real-time-ray-tracing-setup-optimization.html

 

 8 minutes 40 seconds, he states "I'm using a lower end laptop"..

 

I find it rather interesting that you do not see the speed in which it is rendering on the bottom right in that video. He is not using the same software you and I are using. So the videos cannot be used as an example of the speed in which he is doing this. In the title bar it states X13 in the title bar of whatever version he is using is not x13. The one he is using more then likely has optimizations made to it to run better than the commercially available version of X13 I noticed that when I mimicked his settings identically on my machine I would not be able to click through the dialogs like he is doing with the ray tracing being viewed. I get a whole lot of spinning wheel while it loads the dialogs That is complete BS and is false advertising stating he is using a low end laptop to run the software but in reality is runs like a big fat turd on a computer that is ranked in the top 1% of commercially available computers made.

 

 

Oh and those of you that stated that "passes" is the wrong  term to use.. you want to check out at exactly 10 seconds.

 

14:30 seconds says it is able to render within seconds in the perspective floor view. NOT. takes the same amount of time as the perspective full view.

 

 

[Kbird1]

I don't think anyone here is saying it is perfect, certainly not me, but that Video is about a year old and was shot with a Beta Version of Chief X13 , so it's likely some things have changed since then, but you can try the Plan used,  it is in the Samples Gallery and is called Nashville.

 

*Camera Kitchen 3 is the Camera view in the Video.

 

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/samples.html

 

Chief has never used SLI or Cross Fire and that Tech is now being depreciated even by Nvidia as single GPUs these days are powerful enough in most use cases.

 

For comparison my 3080Ti does about 14 samples/per sec and goes upto about 40+ the higher it goes eg over 2500>5000.

 

1 hour ago, Kbird1 said:

I believe Scott H. had a 3060 12GB when he did the Videos...

 

In fact for this Video Scott was using a 2060.............. seen at 35mins.....

 

 

 

 

[HumbleChief]

Hard to jump into this conversation at this point and the OP's frustration is understandable but I was wondering if kgschlosser might find a way to post a/the plan he's working with and have someone else with a different video card or setup try the same RTRT runs and check results? Just an idea.

[Renerabbitt]

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

I have ZERO lights turn on so it's not that.

I'm not sure which part of the discussion we are addressing here
 

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

I have lowered all of the sunlight and ambient light settings doing this doesn't change the speed at all.

and it wouldnt change the speed for the most part, in any rendering program
 

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

The surrounding pixels around the white ones have enough data to fill in properly so there is something wrong with the way the rendering is being done o the code that is used to do the rendering.

This is the freshman year of this rendering tech for chief, and fireflies are very common without the introduction of some extremely complex sampling and AA features. Most rendering platforms utilize a denoiser to rid of fireflies which is similar to what you were suggesting. Just hasnt happened yet. All in all though a denoiser is often times a bandaid. I personally know how to rid my shot of fireflies, but it is a lot to explain.

 

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

But I am still not using more than 50% of the GPU at any time

The utilization would be greater if you continued to move your camera around. For comparison, with realtime raytracing we can play a video game at 80 FPS vs a still image you are trying to process. Keeping in mind chief does a pretty good job at limiting the amount of the overall mesh that it is calc'ing for. Chief's RTRT is better at hardware implementation than twinmotions current offering cept for the denoiser.

 

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

x11 and brought up the speed of the ray tracing in that here on the forums

CPU based, this sounds like a separate issue so I won't speak to it here. 

 

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

why does a program that is supposed to be so intensive not use the single biggest thing to it's advantage

This is VERY common in rendering engines, with only a few rendering plugins utilizing both CPU and GPU. has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the architecture of the software. Take Lumion as an example.

 

 

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

advantage, SLI or CrossFire??

A dead platform and a lot of reasons for NOT using SLI, has to do with how SLI processes a rendered frame. Engines like Unreal use alternate frame rendering, but the assumption is that most consumers will use single cards so it was a good decision to build around a single card architecture for better performance.
If you want to utilize all logical cores and all graphics cards, you could render in Thea.
 

9 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

Gonna have to cut my losses using chief and move to using Revit or the like. not able to render and the software not using all of the available processing power to run means the company just wants to make minor bug fixes and changes but doesn't want to stay with the times. Rendering is not new technology and after making software for as many years as chief has been around and not have a way to render built into it  means they will never have a way to do it, well not one that works correctly anyhow. A software company that can't stay with the leading edge technology is a dying software company. Time to start learning something new I would rather get frustrated doing that then frustrated with trying to figure out how to get something to work correctly when it is handicapped by design and will more then likely never work correctly. If they cannot get it right in 10 years they never will.

Not meaning to poke the bear but this statement is full of holes. First off, so you know, Chief has been around for longer than Revit, it has been holding up quite nicely and run by a very competent team. Second up, I know a handful of people including myself that can draw a full plan 4x faster than the best revit technician without breaking a sweat, talk about improving with the times. I regularly get revit handoffs with a time log of 200 hours, whereas I havent broken a 40 hour plan set in 5 years now. It is not even comparable. Go to revit if you need to perform large commercial work. BTW revit (I believe until this year) has always utilized plugin rendering options. Chief can export just like revit can, no reason you can export to a dedicated rendering program.
I think some of the frustration you are experiencing stems from a lack of information on just how a modern rendering engine can take use of better composition, materials, lighting and the lot.
I host an old copy of the Thea Render Manual on my website, it is rendering gold. Though it has information specific to Thea, it was the best piece of literature I had ever read for learning about how a rendering program works, and how to avoid such things as fireflies.
I don't know what the argument for passes vs samples is about but they are two different things and the designation in the Rendering Technique is handling a sample rate, not a designated number of passes, it is the correct term.

Here is an example of chief rendering in a proper scene in realtime. I had a complex set of maps in the metal base material so I needed to increase sample rate for the final image. BTW plenty of denoise plugins for post processing out there.
https://forums-cdn.chiefarchitect.com/chieftalk/monthly_2021_12/211229.mp4.8d37dfb74b360e9fa2d28253d0c3a6d2.mp4

[kgschlosser]

Well I know why the ray trace performance is so bad. They are using DXR which is Microsoft's API for Ray tracing. The problem with using this is it ha a lot of additional overhead and it also doesn't use specific features that are available to enhance performance. With Nvidia graphics that is the RT Cores. That is the reason why I do not see my car use go over 50%. That's because DXR is not able to use the card to it's potential.. So going out and spending 5,000 on a video card is not going to give you performance that was worth spending  5000 dollars. This is simply because chief architect is not written to take full potential of a computer. chief architect is also not written to utilize multiple CPU cores in the best manner If it was you would see more then a single process running for it. While it does use multiple cores it lets windows handle when things get run. Spawning more processes and sharing data between the processes is faster once it is running. It does however take longer to initially start the program and has a higher memory footprint but the tradeoff when dealing with  complex math and large data sets is worth it.

 

chief architect also has a fairly large memory leak or multiple small leaks. If I leave the application running overnight on startup it is consuming 4GB of memory for the plan I am working on next day not having done any work at all (computer stays running and never sleeps) The ram use is close to 9GB and the program has an incredible amount of lag and needs to be shutdown and restart.

 

X13 has at least twice as many bugs as X11. The largest and most annoying one is having to close and reopen chief in order to get it to redraw the 3D views for ceiling planes and to update roof planes for things like changes to the gutters.. In 3 years they haven't fixed many bugs that have been around since x11, they still exist in X13.

 

I am willing to bet the version of Chief that was being used in those videos has code in it that uses either the Nvidia SDK or the ATI SDK to target the card being used to get the maximum amount of performance from the graphics adapter. That is why it is only taking a "few seconds" on a "lower end laptop" to do the ray tracing. doing that is complete BS because that is what I used to make the decision to buy it. It's false advertising showing a person a product and stating it is the version that was purchased when in fact it is not. In no way could any "low end laptop" render that fast using the version of x13 that is for sale, It's impossible

 

Just to let you know I am a programmer/software engineer so I know how the code in chief is written. DXR does not use the Nvidia specific ray tracing functions from the OptiX SDK but instead uses a software based shader approach which doesn't use the RT cores in the card. I know this because of the DLL's that are loaded and not 1 function from the OptiX SDK are seen in any of the DLLs that have been loaded.

 

The Nvidia OptiX API/SDK which is the way to utilize ray tracing with Nvidia adapters has been around since 2009. So there is no excuse as to why it is not being used. The ATI API has been around for a similar length of time as well...

 

This is exceedingly frustrating because of the amount of time it is going to take to learn a new piece of software and there is slim pickings as far as software goes for stick built residential.

 

Oh and after 30000 samples the renderings are still grainy They are better then when it is set to 20000 and that is better then set to 10000 so it is still improving the image at 30000 samples

 

 

[kgschlosser]

I wanted to mention that the hot spots of light seen in corners and where walls/ceilings meet i a bug. It is attached to the backdrop intensity and if you set the intensity lower then a value of 1.0 it starts going away. 1.0 and above it remains the same brightness. it shows up in any corner that the opposite is on the exterior. changing the lux for the sun doesn't effect how bright it is either.

 

I cannot figure out how to get rid of the grainy in the renderings. Nothing I do seem to make it go away.

 

[HumbleChief]

Can you post a problem plan, or a link if it's too large, so perhaps others could test it on another system?

[HumbleChief]

5 hours ago, kgschlosser said:

I am willing to bet the version of Chief that was being used in those videos has code in it that uses either the Nvidia SDK or the ATI SDK to target the card being used to get the maximum amount of performance from the graphics adapter. That is why it is only taking a "few seconds" on a "lower end laptop" to do the ray tracing. doing that is complete BS because that is what I used to make the decision to buy it. It's false advertising showing a person a product and stating it is the version that was purchased when in fact it is not. In no way could any "low end laptop" render that fast using the version of x13 that is for sale, It's impossible.

Let's see if we understand this claim. Scott Harris, who does the videos for Chief, had his technical team set up a special version of software code to demonstrate Chief's Real Time Ray Tracing on a "lower end laptop" so he could bait people into buying the software, then switch up the software in the retail version to burn customers who thought the video was demonstrating the actual time it took to Ray Trace a scene in Chief? Is that accurate?

[MPDesign]

I have to chime in here, I've been using Chief since 1997. Prior to that 25 years in the field building what others designed.

IMHO It is the top residential software for doing residential design. Yes it has some bugs, problems, tools that could be better. But still worth the price! No software is perfect at everything. Change and improvement is what we are paying for.

 

With the help of other users on the forum over the years and a lot of time using the software, I have been able to make the plans and models of the end design shown here.

This PBR although not perfect turned out pretty good. The model has approx. 2,780,000 faces in the scene. 1500 sample rate caped. took under 2 minutes on my machine.

Settings page attached, also the default glass has been changed to a general material. See screen grab.

Also another trick to minimize the fire fly's is to turn off refraction in the pbr settings dialog.

 

[HumbleChief]

Nice work Michael...

[Chrisb222]

3 hours ago, HumbleChief said:

Let's see if we understand this claim. Scott Harris, who does the videos for Chief, had his technical team set up a special version of software code to demonstrate Chief's Real Time Ray Tracing on a "lower end laptop" so he could bait people into buying the software, then switch up the software in the retail version to burn customers who thought the video was demonstrating the actual time it took to Ray Trace a scene in Chief? Is that accurate?

 

Yeah that's it. Mwahahahahaha!!

[SHCanada2]

can't one just download the sample plan, and see how long the camera Scott was using takes?

 

My RTRT takes a few seconds for my plans...granted my plans are simple but still if one can do the sample plan in the time Scott did it, and one cannot do their own plan in a similar time, then it would point to something in the plan.

 

It seems to me one would confirm the sample plan behaviour,, and if it is the same as Scott, contact tech support on one's own plan