Chief Architect has many camera settings that can assist you in creating
effective 3-D views.
When you have a Chief Architect plan open you can create a 3-D view by going to
the 3-D menu, then down to create perspective view.
Perspective cameras are meant to simulate a human perspective.
They have a vanishing point unlike orthographic views which are meant to
maintain the scale of objects in the view,
no matter your distance or angle to them.
We're going to create a perspective view and I'm going to create a full camera.
A full camera view is designed to allow us to look as though we are standing
within the scene as opposed to a full overview which will automatically place
you outside of the home looking down.
The same goes for our perspective floor overview,
which will place you outside the home looking down,
except that you're going to see only the floor that you're on without any
ceilings or roof planes. So that's what we also call our dollhouse view.
We're going to create a full camera,
so I'm going to select this tool and notice that my cursor changed to a camera
icon.
This allows me to click where I want to stand and drag in the direction that I
would like to see,
and when I release my mouse it will open up a new tab for my camera view.
To go back to the plan view, I can simply click on the floor plan tab.
Then to go back to the camera view,
I can click on the camera tab or I can double click on the camera to open that
view. When I'm in a plan view and I look under the 3-D menu,
there are several options that will be greyed out. For instance,
our rendering techniques, which we'll go through here in a moment,
some of our camera view options and lighting options.
The reason why these are greyed out in a plan view is that they require looking
at a particular 3-D view.
So once we are in a camera view and we go to that menu,
when we go to our rendering techniques,
we can suddenly see all of them are available for us to choose.
Same with our camera view options and some additional lighting options as well
as our material painter because we can't paste materials unless we can see
materials. So while within this camera view,
I'm gonna take a look at some of our camera settings.
We can do this in one of two ways. First, from the floor plan view,
we can select the camera, click on it just one time. So if I double click on it,
it's going to open up the camera view,
but if I click on it just once I can see my edit menu down here.
So I'm going to come down to open object,
the shortcut of which is Ctrl-E and this is going to open up the camera settings
as opposed to opening up the camera view.
I'm going to show you another way that we can find this.
From within the camera view we can either go up to the 3-D menu and go to edit
active camera,
or we can go to the shortcut here on our toolbar for edit active camera.
So I'll select that and I'm going to focus on just the settings that affect the
3- D view.
I'm going to move my dialog off to the side so that we can see what happens as
we make changes. Most of these will not update as we're selecting them,
so you won't see a change in that 3-D view until we click okay,
but there are some like the light set.
I'm going in to adjust the lights so that I can choose all of the lights that
are in the kitchen, which I'm looking at, and the living room,
which is behind me. So I'm going to first create a new set,
going to call it kitchen and living room,
and then I'm going to select all of the kitchen and turn them on.
I'm going to hold down my Ctrl key again to select all of the living room lights
and click one of the check boxes to turn all of them on. Then I'll select done,
and now all other lights besides the kitchen and living room are turned off.
I'm also going to select to show shadows so that we can see the shadows in this
view. I'm going to show reflections,
bloom was already selected which is that haze that you see around lights within
a 3-D view, and I'm going to select edge smoothing when idle.
All of these options will enhance the 3-D view,
but they may slow down your rendering speeds so you may not want to have them on
at all times.
So then I'll select okay and you'll see the effect take place.
And when we're in a full camera view we're not limited to the view that we
opened up. We can use some tools to help us move around in the plan.
So under the 3d menu we have some move camera with mouse tools.
So we have the mouse orbit that lets us turn.
We have the mouse pan, which lets us pan up and down,
and there are several others that will help you focus and tilt the camera.
There are also some move camera with keyboard options.
I'm going to leave those the same.
I'm gonna move back to the mouse orbit camera. And with my keyboard,
I'm going to use the arrow keys. The up arrow will move me forward in the plan.
The down arrow will move me backwards.
The left arrow will help me to turn left and the right arrow will help me to
turn right.
So this will allow you to virtually walk through the home and look in any
direction that you need to. If we go back to our edit camera,
we also have some positioning.
So when we used the left and right arrow keys that adjusted our camera angle,
when we used the up and down arrows that effected our X and Y position,
which is the position that we are within the plan.
The height above floor is effected from panning up and down within the plan and
the tilt angle was effected when we rotated.
So this all looks very different than it did when we opened it up just a minute
ago. And if you want a very specific angle,
you can open up the camera and type them in here.
I also will use the scroll wheel on my mouse in order to zoom in and out.
So when I move forward with the scroll wheel I zoom in,
and when I move back I zoom out.
It may be the opposite depending upon your computer settings and when I clicked
down on the mouse it allows me to pan around
so those can also be effective ways to move within the plan.
Now in the camera that we have open,
we're using what we call our standard render technique.
If we look on our toolbar here we can see all of the techniques that we have
available. These can also be found as we saw earlier under the 3-D menu,
rendering techniques.
So I'm going to go through just to show each of the techniques.
So we're in standard right now with the particular settings that we've set up
for our camera.
You can go into a vector view which is going to show all of our patterns in
lines.
We can do a glass house allowing us to peer through objects such as cabinets and
through walls into the next room. A duotone,
which is going to be like a sepia effect, technical illustration,
painting, watercolor,
line drawing, and our physically based render.
Physically based render is the closest to the standard render,
but it adds in some additional lighting and reflection options to make a more
realistic image. It can take a couple of seconds for it to take effect.
And the final option is our Ray trace.
So the Ray trace is yet another photo enhanced image
but unlike the physical based render where we can move around within the scene,
it's going to take a snapshot, almost like a picture with a camera.
So when you select the Ray trace,
it's going to ask what configuration you want to use.
And once you have the configuration you want,
which you can choose new configurations by either launching the assistant or by
editing the current configuration. And once that's set up,
you can click to Ray trace.
This will export the image into a new tab and begin to go through a series of
passes. The more passes that you allow to elapse,
the more clear the image will get. So the first pass,
which may take a minute or two to produce will not be as effective as later
passes. I'm going to pause and let this Ray trace go for a few minutes.
So now we're 16 passes into this Ray trace,
and the longer it goes the clearer the image will become.
There are additional image properties found right here in the toolbar and these
are similar to photo editing properties that can affect the image further.
This is a static image,
so if I go back to my camera view and I make any changes,
my Ray trace will not be effected. When finished with the Ray trace,
you can click to stop it. Now we'll go back to my full camera view.
Any image from the program can be saved as a picture file,
so if you go to file and then export, you can select to export a picture.
You can use the active window size or you can make it larger or smaller
depending upon what you need.
You can also export a 360 Panorama and either save it onto your desktop or save
it into the Chief Architect cloud if your SSA is active. You can name it,
create a description, I'm going to de-select save to disk,
select okay.
It'll ask you to log into your account and then when you log into your Chief
Architect account online,
you can go into your 360 panoramas and you'll find it there and you can either
view it here or
you can make it public,
which will create a link for you to be able to share with others or to embed on
your website.
You can also export 3-D models of the home in much the same process,
and those can also be saved to your Chief Architect cloud account and used in
our app, the 3-D viewer.
And when you have a camera that you like in the plan,
all of the settings within the camera,
including the particular render type that you're using, can be saved.
You could do that either by opening up your camera settings and clicking to save
it,
or by clicking the save option which is right next to your edit active camera.
When you select that and you close out of a camera view when you go back to your
plan view, as long as your camera layer is turned on,
which it is not right now. So I'll open up my layers to turn on the camera.
You'll find that saved camera in exactly the same position that you drew it,
and you can simply double click to open it back up.
So whether you want to present the home in live views such as this,
in exported picture files like this one,
or an exported 360 images or 3-D models on your Chief Architect account,
there are many ways for you to create effective 3-D presentations with Chief
Architect.