Angie15

Its really easy to replicate. In HD pro 2025. Draw an external wall or room, any wall doesn’t matter. Increase the wall depth to about 400mm from center. Place a window, with external casing. (70mm) recess the window frame by about 150mm choose any default 2025 sill/shape profile and recess it. Bam z-fighting.

@Renerabbitt Ah sure, maybe I should give you some training in Twin Motion then, because I can import, setup and get about 6 fully raytraced Exterior images in about 20mins, if I need to. IF I faff and take my time with one interior scene/picture, then yeah it’ll be about an hour too. I don’t bill per hour. I quote engineers, architects, surveyors, carpenters and interior designers ahead based on their plans as they need a fixed price to in turn pass on to their clients. There is no way I could charge per hour here, I’d be out of business. No one here pays per hour unless you’re a gardener, cleaner, child-minder etc and/or only doing a 2–4-hour job. So yes, I completely disagree. I’ll provide a quote based on what I can see on the CAD plans as well as fixed eta timeline. (About €400 for a TM Exterior, 6 pictures ) of an average 1800sft bungalow house. If I asked for anything more than that, I’d be told to go fly a kite. I’m pretty much already pushing the top end of the scale and it taken me years! It’s only because of my level of accuracy and attention to detail that I’ve got this far. You want to talk about work flow…I spend on average about 20 hours, PER JOB, “fixing” Chiefs’ holes and gaps with soffits, wedges, slabs and shapes thanks to the obnoxious wall, railing, and fence snapping; manually building window sills because they Z-fight, manually building dormer windows because the auto-floating dormer doesn’t work with 400mm cavity walls, manually building roofs with barge/verge walls, manually building skylight shafts, manually building corner windows and doors, manually building gutters, downpipes, building objects in SketchUp and importing them etc. And the terrain controls in chief are an entirely different kind of joke. THAT’S where my work flow problem exists!! Then…. Just when you think you have everything technically patched up… you switch to PBR… and all your ”patches” light up like Christmas trees because Chief cant “rasterize” in PBR properly. I'd probably turn off 3D dimentions if I could, makes no difference to me since I work off real CAD plans and elevations in CAD "Are you sure? because it did fix it on my HD2026" Apologies, your sill does work and fixed it in 2026...but now cmere, you’re blatantly admitting there was a Z-fighting issue otherwise you wouldn’t have had to “fix it” without me posting any futher details. Without "your" sill, the problem still exists in 2026. I appreciate that you took the time and thank you, but unforntunately, like I said Pro 2025-2022 is the issue, not 2026. Ill let go of my distain for this software when it actually works.

@RenerabbittI know PBR isn’t a ray-trace. It was an example of how chief managed to bollox the implementation of an industry standard (PBR) in their HD products. I had concerns that chief would similarly do a half-arsed version of ray-trace. Now, while the ray-trace in 2026 is ok...is it worth the annual subscription they’re charging for it, given that other external engines are doing it better and cheaper? Absolutely not. The few other token-gesture improvements are negligible. I’ve been using the trial version and there’s nothing there that I’d be excitedly throwing my money at. Ill reply to you on my other post regarding the sill z-fighting when I get a chance. Unfortunately, your fix doesn’t fix it. I’ve sat with technical support for months regarding it, and if technical support can’t fix it, I doubt you can, but I’m willing to give it another shot because it drives me that insane!

Unfortunately, I don’t think you can, unless you previously purchased it. The HD pro range is no longer available.

@RenerabbittI’m glad you picked up on my tone because I’m absolutely fed up. I posted that question before I used the trial version of 2026. I’m well aware of how Ray-tracing works, (or is supposed to work). I was querying whether Chief would actually do that because their attempt at PBR in HD was so poor. I’m also aware that Chief Premier had ray-tracing long before TM etc and I have used the trail version. What I’m saying is, that Chief has long since been overtaken by the likes of other free or less expensive software, and in a world where AI can generate photo-real images in minutes, and of all the things they could’ve done to improve the HD software, they’ve chosen to offer ray-tracing and charge 4x the annual price. All the other technical glitches and issues of HD Pro 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 etc, still remain. There is absolutely no other benefit to 2026, other than ray-tracing, and raytracing can be done on an external engine for free (with less effort and better results imo, especially for exterior renders)

@Renerabbitt here, sort this this out.

Cancel your 2026 subscription and revert to HD Pro 2024. There is no HD Pro 2026. They combined all their products into one inferior, subscription-based bundle and marketed it as “The best that’s ever been seen, the world has never seen the likes before, never has it been better”

@RenerabbittYou're out of your mind if you think this 2026 release is worth more than bog roll. Chief Architect has actually REMOVED several functions and controls from HD Pro 2025. Since you’re so affiliated with Chief Architect, maybe you could look into all my technical questions I’ve logged that cant be resolved?

I sincerely hope so, because PBR was ultimately crap and completely uncontrollable and unrealistic. Metals never reflected correctly, the backdrop over-exposed, it was an disaster. "The feature is called Real-Time Raytracing and it offers the highest quality, photorealistic rendering." Laughable and almost ridiculous, About 4 years behind on all your competitors there, and I doubt it will be anywhere near what TwinMotion or Simlab can do for free. Will it render only what it sees, or will it still over-light the backdrop and other "objects" exposed to the exterior like chimneys, slabs and soffits? Will the trees (images) cast shadows? Will I still have to "set it up as a photoshoot" and add a hundred lights to make it work?

Have you fixed the window sill Z-fighting yet? As per my technical support complaint? No point offering ray-traying if it still ray-traces wrong?

Chiefs terrain elevation controls are stupid. Extend the elevation lines all the way to the end of the terrain and then add another duplicate elevation line at the back of the house to flatten it out.

The Gable Porch entrance extends further forward than the other other exterior walls. "Flat angled roof" is a pefectly acceptable description, and any experienced architect would know exactly what you mean and how to incorporate it. Unfortunately, the easiest is to manually build those roofs, because its probably beyond HD Pro's capabability to autobuild, but even if you purchased premier, you'd still have to manually build it.

Select the front GF wall, change it to a hip wall. select the left side bearing wall and change it to a high shed wall. Tell first floor to ignore roof (or in chiefs case, 2nd floor.) The back wall roof pitch will determine the roof and attic walls for the 4 horizontal windows, but my bet is that you'll have to build this manually, its beyond HD Pro. Its even beyond Premier. Its a manual build.

Im aware I can remove the details tab. Im talking about the filters tab, where it no longer shows the sub-folders but everything in the entire volume instead of the folders! I did say what additional controls I was epecting. Read my original again. I was expecting explicit control over the window sills (as attached). Why does the window sill still Z-fight with the wall? If you even bothered to try this with a default plan you'd know what Im talking about. In Pro 2025, build an exterior wall (any wall) Increase that wall to a 350mm depth from center. place a window with casing. Recess a 50mm depth window frame, 100mm from the exterior wall, then recess the window sill. change the casing colour. oh look. Z-fighting! Im ranting because Id expect you and any other Pro User to know this and Ive been on about this for years! The gutter moulding problem according to Chief technical, is that I found a way to manipulate the software in a way that wasn't intented. If it wasnt intended, why have the option? Home designer suite did it no problem, so did Pro right up until 2023? So Chief removed the softwares ability to apply moulding to a gutter, but forgot to remove the ability to do do? Right.

Gutter Moulding. I was told by Chief Technical that there was no way for me to fix the problem, because the software shouldnt have been able to do it in the first place. Wow.