glennw

Are you looking on the floor you drew the deck on, or the floor below?

I don't think it will help in your particular situation, but... You can usually use the Tab key to precisely place a wall break along a wall length. Click the Wall Break tool. Snap and drag along the wall from the end of the wall. Hit Tab. Enter the distance and angle. In your case the 6" is below what I believe is a Chief restriction on wall length. This works OK with wall lengths over about 10".

As per my previous post:

Dermot, Can you give us a quick lesson regarding what and how Chief "remembers" when a room is deleted and then recreated. I know it happens and it was described as a feature way back when. It seems like the new room has to be in approx. the same area as the old - but I would love to know the "rules". This "feature" is obviously causing some unexpected problems so it would be good to know how it works. I could find nothing about this in the help files. I have a feeling that it also has to do with deleting internal walls and the way Chief applies the parameters if they are different for each room. Maybe we need an option to recreate the room to the defaults or recreate it to the previous room parameters.

Chad, Have you had a play with Structural Member Reporting?

Scott, Are you talking about doing them in 2D or 3D? Chief has a pretty good collection of 2D cad blocks for trees and plants in a bonus library - Cad Image Blocks. They also have plenty of 3D trees and plants. It is really easy to change a 2D cad block for a 3D plant symbol. Just assign one of the 2D cad plant blocks to the 3D symbol - takes 5 seconds - sorry, 5.332 seconds.

Chop, Give me a call on Skype if you are so inclined. Skype name is glenn-woodward.

Larry, If you have the time and inclination, I would really like to have a Skype session with you so you can show me when these problems occur. We both may be able to learn something. Or, better still, it would be great if Scott could host a GoToMeeting.

Matt, Probably because you had the same material for both the ceiling attached to the roof and the room's default ceiling material. Thus, when you changed that setting, you couldn't see any difference.

Or, if you want to do it directly in the dimension default, you can select Use Custom Text Style and then Transparent. This sets the Text Style directly with the dimension default and doesn't rely on a separate text style to set the dimension text. I have all my dimension default text styles setup like this.

Lew, OK. In the above scenario, could you please tell me how many warnings you would want and where they should be and what they should say. I suspect that you will dodge the request. But why not spend some time and come back with an answer that may help.

Johnny, There is no conflict. Chief is doing exactly what Larry is telling it to do. Larry is choosing a setting which is not the default and then expecting Chief to build to the default setting. In his first video, he fails to change the floor structure and thus the foundation doesn't build to the default, it builds to the setting in the room dbx. In this particular case, it is somewhat complicated by the fact that when the room is deleted and redrawn, Chief is rebuilding the room to the "remembered" settings and not the defaults. If we had warnings regarding every situation, we would never get any work done. This is complicated stuff, and I think Chief mostly gets it right by giving us as much flexibility as possible for these automated functions. If you don't want the automation and the complexities it entails, by all means, do it manually.

Larry, You hit the nail on the head. Chief has a "feature" whereby it remembers the settings that apply to a room so that if you edit it (or delete a wall), the settings will then be applied when the room is restored. When the room is restored with the old settings (and you don't want those settings), you need to go into the room dbx and check Default for the various settings (or in this case, change the Floor settings). This is what you missed doing in your vid.

No worries Chop. That is one little trick I dragged up from the depths. Finesse, yeah, that's me!

This vid may help. http://screencast.com/t/NOEMW0y6

Ah, just discovered that you have "hang Floor Platform Above On Wall" checked for your Exterior Wall Default. I am not sure it is doing much, but probably shouldn't be checked.

As far as I can tell, the thing that is stopping those attic walls from building correctly is that they are designated as "Hang Floor Platform Above On Wall". Make sure Auto Build Attic Walls is toggled on. Select the offending attic walls and uncheck "Hang Floor Platform Above On Wall". The attic walls will build correctly. I can't image how this setting was caused by Chief, so I am assuming it was set by the user. In fact, a lot of your walls on level 1 and the attic have this setting checked. I would go through and uncheck this for ALL you walls. One other weird thin that is happening is when I double click those offending walls, the wall dbx does not open. I have to open the wall dbx by going to the Edit toolbar and Open Object.

It could be best to move the terrain and leave the structure as is. Depends on how complicated each is.

Scott, Depending on your exact situation, you could try using a railing and then define it as a Foundation Wall. The footing then becomes your solid wall, with the railing on top.

Johnny, When you drag the wall, and hit Tab, I think you will see that the Angle has changed (because of how you dragged the cursor?). So you need to specify the angle (180deg in this case) as well as the distance. I assume that you have Orthogonal set as your Primary Movement Method which is restricting the movement of the polygon to up and down (Orthogonal), even though your cursor is sliding sideways as well as down. Walls work a bit differently The resolution of your vid makes it hard to see, but I am pretty sure that's what is happening.

If you use saved cameras in you default floor plan, you can toggle this setting on for each camera and then save the template plan. This is a per camera setting, so it will stick to the saved cameras in the template plan. Because it is a per camera setting, it will stick with any saved camera in your plan. But, yes, I agree, this should be a default setting.

Because you have them toggled on to display - makes no difference whether they have entities on them or not. Now, if you click on the Used column, you will see the layers that have entities on them at the top of the list.

CJT1963, I know nothing about HDP, only CA. Those wall types are EASILY achievable in CA. In fact, those dbx's look like they are from at least 3 or 4 versions back - there have been many improvements since then. Here in Oz, we use timber stud frame, cavity brick and brick veneer ALL the time - no problem. You could probably specify just about any type of wall you could want or ever think of - defining a wall type is the last thing you will need to be concerned about. I would be interested to know, more specifically, what the UK users are dissatisfied with.

Michael, Yes, this setting is view specific - so you can have a different default for each CAD Detail. Similar to the way that sun settings in 3D views are view specific - ie, per camera view.

It's important to note that the Display Line Length Format setting only applies to lines that have Show Length and Show Angle checked. Also, the Display Line Length Format setting is view specific. ie, it can be set independently for floor plans (different on each floor), elevations (different in each elevation.