3D Viewer by Chief Architect

Fast and easy to use. Very difficult if not impossible to isolate a single floor and allow easy overview of that floor. Have to align the slices perfectly and even then it leaves things all jittery. Great for overall viewing, horrible for fine detail viewing. And get that top bar off the screen its huge and gets in the way.

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Let me start off by saying that I love chief architect. I was super excited to learn about this app. It does a very good job of allowing you to view your design in 3D mode. It's very impressive in front of clients.......but it's way behind on going between a 3D view and a 2 dimensional floor plan. When sitting in front of a client you don't always need a 3D model. 2 dimensional plans are equally important when discussing layout and flow of an area. An app that does this flawlessly is BIMX. It allows you to view your design in 3D or 2D plans. I'm not saying it needs to be exactly like BIMx but even the option of loading your 3D model along with a separate tab that also allows you to load your 2D construction documents would go a long way when talking to clients in a real world situation. Keep up the great work. I can't wait to see where this app goes from this moment.

Most importantly, I frequently get out of memory errors when loading models even after I’ve attempted to optimize. There’s only so much you can take out after all. The rendering engine seems to need work. There are games I play that seem to use much more complex polygons, textures and lighting that run faster than the models in this app. Next, there should be a floor plan view that mimics the view in Chief Architect instead of only having the textured floor plan. It would be great if we could also control the layers to hide or show them. I’d like to be able to see notes I made on my desktop as text boxes. Along these lines, the floor navigation in the floor plan is really just a cross section height adjustment and is difficult to control. I’m glad controller support was added. It really takes away some awkwardness when showing models to others and having them gather around your iPad if you’re not in a position to mirror your screen. Support for saved walkthroughs would be nice. Overall, I’m glad this app exists as it was key to choosing Chief Architect that I be able to show and share models. I just wish some things could be enhanced.

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Great idea. Got it to use with my field subs and clients. Sent a link to share a model with them. They could not load without creating an account with Chief it was hard for them from the shared model link and I had to help with that. Difficult to share content. ID numbers way too long and links not as seamless as you would imagine. 3D texturing not very good. Would like to send models and be able to walk thru a plan in 2D and seeing in 3D. Would be more useful called Chief Architect Viewer without the 3D and one could send 2D layers of 2D as well. Thinking of it as a collaboration tool with end user recipients of shared content who are holding phones in the field would provide a better framework of how to Redesign interface to make it truly useful. I look forward to future versions.

Just thought I’d give it a try and am amazed. My clients love it and after getting used to the controls, it’s worked seamlessly for us. Haven’t had any probs loading models from 11 and it takes the place of laying out the walkthroughs. Thanks Chief!