kellyh

Have you drawn in the custom ceiling planes at the lower height for the room? If so, is the "Height Inside Wall" set to the proper height in the custom ceiling specification?

Without seeing your plan I can't say for sure but this might be a situation where you make two floors and have the second floor be an open below room. Set the first floor rooms to all be 16' tall and then create a second floor over just the taller area but make it's absolute elevation 32' and change the room type to Open below to remove the floor from the second floor and have it open to the first floor.

Some things that I've done in the past to increase the quality of my exterior ray traced views in X17. All of these settings except for the grass region and sun are part of the PBR rendering techniques dialog: Change Tone Mapping Operator: Try switching to ACES instead of Hable For the exterior, if you're using a backdrop image, try increasing the Daytime Backdrop Intensity to something like 10,000. I wouldn't recommend this for interior views but it can help with blending the background and the building together in exterior views Also try playing with the Color/Hue/Saturation sliders. Those can also help increase the realness of the ray trace Other things I've tried include using a grass region to make a more realistic looking grass and using the mid-morning sun brightness, around 75,000 Lux, to make a more realistic look to my renders. Also, using the Move Sun tool to control the shadows can create more realism to the lighting. Unfortunately each render is unique and different and what may look good in my eye may not look good to you. These are just suggestions I've used in the past to try making some good looking renderings. I hope that helps point you in the right direction!

Our testing team has verified X17 works on the full release of MacOS Tahoe.

Thanks, Joe. While I don't intend to have a drawn out conversation about this, I do want to address that potentially dangerous sentiment here: we fully understand your frustration and desire for your feature requests to get into the program, but please bear in mind that our development team is broken up into many smaller teams that work on different areas of the software. So, just because there's a fancy new rendering feature doesn't mean it has taken resources away from another feature or project in the program. There are simply too many requests to address as quickly as we would like, so there is a lot of prioritization we have to do. Please trust that each development team works to make the program better for our users and make them more successful.

Please don't take Tyler's reply to mean that we've never written down this request before or that it's the first time development is hearing about it. It's not. Whenever we hear about a feature request like this, we pass it along to our development team regardless of whether it's new or not. We are always looking for ways to improve the software and take feature requests from users very seriously. It's just, we get A LOT of feature requests from users and while our developers are good, they are a finite resource. And we simply don't have the time to develop every feature request as soon as it's requested.

So, right off the bat, when I've downloaded your plans, both are behaving the same way. They both are set to go to dimension to the wall surface instead of the wall dimension layer. If you change that in your default settings, that should get it closer to working the way that you want it to. To do that, go to Default Settings->Dimensions->Temporary Dimensions and change the "With Wall Selected" option to "Locate Wall Dimension Layer" It's possible to change what layer is the Wall Dimension layer on a wall type by wall type basis. That may be a better/closer solution to what you're trying to accomplish. Here is a Knowledge Base article covering the process: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00658/specifying-which-wall-layer-dimensions-locate.html

Here's an example of the dialog box that Joe mentioned in his reply. Essentially you're setting the rough ceiling height at the tall height (140.5") but then adding layers (framing, air gap, etc.) to the Ceiling Finish area to push it down 40" to match the ceiling height of the rest of the plan. Hope that helps answer your question!

Here's a quick and dirty example of what I could come up with based on the images you provided. The big thing that I did is instead of setting the left and right sides to "None", I set them to be custom faces that were blank areas that matched the size of the front. I also used feet for the bottom, set the box construction to Framed, and the Door/Drawer overlay to inset. I hope that helps to point you in the right direction!

Reference display is gonna be the best way to do this I think. Sounds like you'll want to put interior vs exterior walls on different layers (you can set this up in your defaults) and then create reference display layer sets for each floor. Then you can use Reference Display to reference multiple floors at the same time and assign the layer set you've made to each floor. Hope that helps!

Instead of making the rooms next to the garage room Attic rooms, just leave them as an unspecified room type and that should create what you're looking for

The typical first culprit for something like this would be a graphics card. I would make sure your graphics card driver is up to date. Our technical support team is a great resource for troubleshooting this further if your graphics driver is up to date. They can be contacted by calling 208.292.3399 or by submitting a case through the Technical Support Center. They would probly want copies of your message log and system information. Here are some Knowledge Base articles on how to find that information: Message Log: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-02908/locating-the-message-log.html System Information: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01867/retrieving-system-information-to-send-to-technical-support.html#Windows I hope that helps!

Hi Terry, The behavior you're describing is not one I've personally experienced in my 13 years working at the company. I would love to get a copy of the plan you're experiencing this with along with detailed steps you went through that ended with you in this state. If this is truly a problem with Chief, the sooner we can get accurate information to our development team, the sooner they can begin working on a way to resolve your issue. You're welcome to attach the plan here, or send in a copy to our technical support team using the Technical Support Center. If you've not used that before, here is a Knowledge Base article that walks through that process: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00717/using-the-technical-support-center.html

@DBCooperhit the nail on the head. Spacebar is the default hotkey for "Select Objects" mode. The escape key will close an open dialog or cancel out of an open text box (think moving objects with dimensions). If you don't have a dialog open or a text box active, the escape key will then cycle in reverse order through the tools you previously used. So, pretend you had drawn some walls, then placed a window, then placed a base cabinet. If you then pressed the escape key, you would change from the base cabinet tool back to the window tool. If you pressed escape again, you would then go back to the wall tool.

In general, I find adjusting the wall layer connections in plan view is easier than trying to manipulate the walls in elevations/3D Views. Especially in a condition like this where the walls are all meeting correctly but the outside layers aren't joining correctly. The tool I mentioned in my reply, "Edit Wall Intersection" is only available in Plan View. Hope that helps!