3D’s new look a year later

It’s been about a year now since Xactimate began making 3D look “prettier” or more realistic or photorealistic as they call it. They defaulted the view setting for 3D details to Textured which gave 3D a wow factor! For example, in 3D toilets actually look like toilets now (instead of a flat area), you have a pretty blue sky, you can add trim to windows (originally it added the trim by default, but widows and doors that were too close had the trim overlapping, so they removed the trim and added an option to add the trim) and features that actually did give it a wow factor. They even added cabinets with fronts in addition to the block tool. It split the properties window by removing the textures and putting it in a separate icon right next to the new properties icon.
 
Unfortunately, at least in my estimation, all these pretty features added no value (that I can see) to the estimators. I mean how often do you include a 3D view in your report. And it also created some programming issues which we will discuss later. For one, you get the big red X more often because of some internal programming conflicts. Perhaps they are trying to appeal to the CAD market which is more concerned with design than quantities. I don’t know. It is above my pay grade. And I try to never criticize Verisk for Xactimate issues because I understand how difficult it is to maintain a constantly updated program of this size. It is a very powerful program, but when changes are made and problems occur, we have to report those problems and wait until they are fixed, which is not always done quickly unless it is extreme severe. If you want a better understanding of what they go through, go to the eservice center, select Xactware Products Release Notes under Helpful Documents and then select Xactimate desktop (X1) release notes.
 
So for now, if you want to go back to the old view there is an option for that. Simply go to the preferences tab in the main screen, select sketch and change the 3D Details in the View Settings to classic (instead of Textured). If you want to change it in just one project, right click in the sketch tab of that project, select View Properties (not Properties) and change the 3D Details there.

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