glennw

I'm more confused than before you posted the pics! What is a plan layout? What is a layout plan? What is a layout plan shown in 3D? I don't see any distortion, only different angles.

3D...Camera View Options...Toggle Textures.

They are auto generated walls that connect rooms inside other rooms. You can turn off this behaviour at Defaults...General Wall Defaults...Connect Island Rooms (Alt+Q). You may have room definition problems in certain situations with this setting toggled off.

Adel, Sounds like some sort of memory limit. Tech support is there to help - that's what we pay SSA for.

Or maybe, instead of deleting page 8, just delete the layout boxes (and any other info) and leave page 8 there.

Adel, Just a wild guess. Have you tried Clear Printer Info? I would be surprised if that was it though. Something corrupt on page 8? Save a copy of the layout and delete page 8 and see what happens.

What sort of distortion? A picture might help. A plan would be better.

And if you look in the status bar, you will find a description of what the tool actually does

In plan view, hatch patterns have their origin at 0,0. So...you could create a new hatch pattern or edit a hatch pattern with a different offset origin. This is a real hassle though because you would need a different hatch pattern for each different origin and if your room changes size, you would need to redo the hatch definition.

Antoine, You first need to capture a picture of your floor plan or site plan which you are going to use to sit your 3D model on. You can use Chief's Screen Capture to do this in a plan view. Before you can use this background plan image, you need to convert it to a material and apply it to a polysolid, terrain or whatever you are using for your base picture. There are a couple of ways to make the material. Go 3D...Materials...Plan Materials...New...Texture panel. Find your picture under Texture Source. Make sure you use stretch to fit. Or, you can do it in the Library Browser...User Catalog..right click...New...New Material And make sure Textures are toggled on in your 3D view.

Brian, If you can't use the Join Roof Planes tool because it is removing part of the roofs that you want to retain, you can use Roof Intersection Points to locate where the roofs intersect. You can then manually edit the roof planes by snapping them to the Roof Intersection Points. I assume that you have Roof Intersection Points toggled off. Go Preferences...Architectural...Roofs...check Automatically Place Roof Intersection Points. Now when you click on a roof and then a second roof, you will see a red point auto generated. This is the intersection point of the 2 roofs. You can place the toolbar icon for Delete Temporary Points on a toolbar to clean the points up as you go - otherwise your plans will look like DSH's!

As far as I can remember, we have never been able to reshape a layout box (apart from being able to fillet the corners).

Railing Specification dbx...Rails panel...Rail Profiles...select Beam...uncheck Automatic Width and enter a width.

This has to do with the difference between using the default glass material and the actual material. I am assuming that Auto Adjust Default Glass Properties is toggled on and left on. Lets ignore the left door, because it has Glass Grey as it's glass material. If you open up each door's dbx and check the glass material, you will notice that there is a difference in the glass material used between the doors that have clear glass and those that have the tinted glass. The doors with clear glass have the glass material set as "Default Glass: Glass Standard". The doors with the tinted glass have the glass material set as just "Glass Standard" - note, no "Default Glass". Select the door and open it's dbx. Materials panel...#Glass...select it and then Select Material...Material Defaults...select Glass (which is set to Glass Standard). OK, OK. You should now have clear glass. Or, as Alan says, you can select Glass Standard from the library. However, if you do this, the Auto Adjust Default Glass Properties will have no effect on how the glass displays - the glass will always be clear and Chief won't auto adjust it.

I can' imagine that bevelled piece of concrete staying in one piece for very long.

Try adding another wall layer to the inside of the wall definition. In this pic, I added another 12" thick layer.

The pony wall method works. What trouble are you having?

I guess it's easier to ask and get someone else to do it for you. Although it would probably be quicker to try it yourself than make the post.

What "certain things"?

Steve, Why don't you try it and see if it works.

Johnny, The height the cad line is always relative to Chiefs zero floor height. The height of the polysolid is relative to the terrain - because it is outside the building (no floor under the object). Use Absolute to avoid the difference. The floor structure shouldn't make any difference. Try drawing an object inside a room with Relative to Floor set, and then drag it outside the room so that it only over the terrain - it's height will change.

Joe, Come on, that's an easy one. The number of decimal places should be an option or preference.

Michael, I am not saying it can't be improved, but wouldn't you expect some problems if you built a railing wall composed of multiple layers?

Chopsaw, I deleted that post and this is the repost with some changes. I was probably out surfing 8 hours ago! I am not sure this is a bug, but it is one of those Chief intricacies. It is caused mainly by the use of a multilayered wall for the railing wall. Larry, Try this. Instead of creating your railing wall from your standard .Stucco-4 Existing wall - which is a 3 layered wall, create a new single layered wall 5" thick, and use that for the railing walls. Having a single layer wall prevents the stucco (or external layer) from building down in the floor space below. This is creating the rectangles in the floor space under the railing walls, which are visible in vector view. Now, go to level 1 and select the wall below, check "Balloon Through Ceiling Above". Do the same for the small side wall to clean them up as well. Things should look perfect in both vector and standard views - in fact all the render modes.

Looks like you need to buy more paper.