glennw

If you try building the roof after making the front entry wall a full gable wall, I believe the gable will build too large and try and continue the 2 side roof slopes up. ie, the gable will be too big. It IS possible to build the roof automatically though. You need to build a small room (with invisible walls if you want) just inside the front doors. Give the room a ceiling height of about 95" (adjust as needed). Make the front door wall a full gable wall. Auto build roofs. Once you have the roof correct you can delete the invisible walls - as long as you don't build roofs again. Why are a lot of your walls Attic Walls -- this shouldn't be needed. The Gable Over Opening is not working because of the restricted space. This tool will not increase the height of the gable roof. It will normally try and build the gable with the default baseline height

That is an interesting concept for doing asbuilts and renos. Try select the walls and making them Invisible, No Room Definition and No Locate. I suspect that this method will bring up further complications though, and make it inpractical.

Joe, I am assuming that the OP wants to graphically see the materials in a floor plan view. I don't think he wants the materials notated.

Open the stair dbx and go to Style...options. Uncheck Automatic Rail Openings. You will need to delete the auto opening that Chief has placed in the rail. You can also change this in the defaults. You will need to control you rail openings by using doors, invisible wall sections, etc. It is actually the rail opening that determines the location of the posts, and the rail opening is placed by the stairs.

Scott, Even though you haven't assigned a material to an object, Chief has default materials for various objects. If you go Defaults...Materials, you will probably find that the Grey3 Siding material is assigned to an object (probably Walls (Exterior).

Dan, I strongly advise you not to use Rotate View. As Michael says, it rotates your "drawing board" - and everything with it. It really doesn't rotate the plan - just your view of the plan. This also means that the coordinate system and snap grid are rotated (that's what you are seeing with the arrow keys). Doing this will not rotate the plan in layout views. I would use Edit Area (All Floors).

Dan, For rich text, try selecting the text and on the Options panel...Size, check CAD Style Font Sizing.

Try Preferences...Reset Options...Reset Toolbars

Rotate it using the Rotate option in the Symbol Specification dbx. Have a look in the manual if you are stuck.

Perry, Yes, my mistake. The ceiling height needs to be lower or raking. I will now take my bat and ball and go home!!! I use this method because I don't do framing and I don't do interior views, except in special cases. I think it is also the best way to do auto roofs - which I do n 90% of my work.

Perry, If it is an invisible wall, there is no opening and no wall above the opening..duh. This is not a bay or box window with different floor or ceiling heights - it's part of a room.

Scott, OK, I have the boxing gloves on. You did not explain why an invisible wall is the way to go And why aren't you considering the auto roof build - you should be!

Sorry, I left out a step in the explanation when switching between a Living Room and a Garage. Did you have Automatically Rebuild Foundation toggled on? I will do a vid. https://www.screencast.com/t/pupmmvrG

Create a separate room for the bump out with an invisible wall between the main room and the bump out. Uncheck Roof Over this Room on the Structure panel of the bump out room dbx. Build auto roofs.

That behavior is Chief trying to help you. Turn auto foundation on. Try changing your Garage to a different internal room type (like Living). With the reference set turned on, you can see how the foundation wall moves in relation to the wall above. Chief will build the foundation wall between a garage and a normal room so that the foundation wall does not intrude into the garage - which is normally at a lower level than the main floor. Chief treats the wall between the garage and a normal room as an external wall and builds the foundation to align with the outer layer (garage side) of the wall.

You should be able to offset it and rotate it in the Symbol Specification dbx

Diane, I am assuming that you want to retain the fill, but have it greyscale rather than colored? To do this, you can use Live View + Always Update. The display of color in layout is then controlled by the Color toggle in the original elevation view. Live View (with or without) Update Always is pretty cool because it reflects exactly what your camera view displays, including Rendering Technique, shadows, color/b&w, etc.

Scott, Huh? I am not sure what you are saying here, but if I understand you correctly, you only have one dimension default which you have to use with each annoset? Are you saying that when you change annosets, you can't get the dimension defaults to change? You can set up as many Saved Dimension Defaults as you like and then use any one of them with any annoset. Either you are missing something or I have misread your post (which is highly likely). I believe that most of the confusion and problems you are having setting up your anno/layer sets is that you tried to go too complicated first up, and now you are trying to back pedal getting it to work. IMHO it would have been easier to start simple and get more complicated as you went along.

You could try Preferences...Reset Options...Reset Toolbars. This will load Chief's default toolbars and you will loose any customisation. You will probably have to restart Chief after doing the above.

I am not sure I agree with David's answer. You can turn off the color fill all together by left clicking the layout box, opening the dbx, go to the General panel...Camera View Options. If you are using Plot Lines, you can uncheck Color Fill. If you want the color fill, but just want to make it lighter, you need to do that in the elevation view itself (not the layout). Open the elevation view and use the rainbow tool (Adjust Material Definition) to select the roof material. Go to the General panel...Colors...Material. Click on the color box and then select a lighter shade of the color by using the side slider. You may have to update the view in layout.

Upgrade to X9 and use the wall niche tool

I agree, water disposal is going to be a big problem. Even with huge rainwater heads, I think you are going to have problems. Here is a similar one I did a few years back. I designed a near flat central roof that fell to each side and the water was then picked up in some oversized gutters. This worked well with no water problems.

OK, lets first deal with the terrain perimeter itself. I think what is happening is that when you are importing the data, you are telling Chief to import the terrain perimeter. So what is happening is that Chief is creating a rectangular terrain perimeter over the small plan to the left. Once Chief has created this terrain, it won't create another one as you can only have one terrain in a plan. Display only the Terrain Perimeter layer, select and delete the terrain perimeter. Now you will be able to create your own terrain perimeter.

Ross, That was really simple - only took a couple of minutes.. Polysolid with General Material class with transparency - I started with Milk Glass. 3D text with similar material.

Something like this?