glennw

How would you want it to work? Here is one way it will work. Assuming your template plan has all your layer sets the way you want them - which is a fairly good asumption. Open your template plan. Export Layer Sets. Now in the plan you are working on with the messed up layer sets. Import Layer Sets. In the Import Layer Sets dbx, you can select a single or multiple layer sets to import. You will be prompted to replace any layer sets with the same name. Click yes. Your layer sets are now back to how they are in your template plan. It's just like having "Template Layer Sets" file that you can restore back to your layer set defaults at any time. You can set up hot keys and toolbar icons for both Import and Export Layer Sets.

Here you go. Glenns hot keys.html

Mark, There is one small feature that allows you to change the dimension text height directly in layout on a per view basis. But it is very basic and limited to dimension text only. Open up the layout box dbx and on the General panel...Dimensions - you can change the dimension height for that layout box.

Hey Chop, In this case, the help file would only be of use AFTER you know what is causing the problem. It wouldn't have been much help to actually FIND the problem. Like Michael, I have played with this setting in the past and it seemed like the direction to head. I just went back and checked with X6 and it works the same as X8. Although I don't remember ever having to check XOR to get the roof lines to display in ref. I guess my memory is failing a little!

Chop, What...you mean there is a help file - is that better than intuition? I am waiting to hear back from support because it seems to not be behaving.

Johnny, Open the Change/Floor Reference dbx. Down at the bottom, uncheck Use XOR Drawing. I am not sure what is going on. I don't know if that has been unchecked as the default in the past, or if it is now working differently. I am sure we didn't need to do anything previously. I will send a ticket to tech support to see if anything has changed. It could be a new bug - or a new "feature".

The gaps in the second floor walls are caused by the ceiling platform height set in the garage dbx (122 3/8"), which is a lot higher than the actual garage ceiling height (104 1/4"). It would appear that a manual roof was drawn over the front part of the garage which overrides the ceiling height set in the garage room dbx, but you still see the cutouts in the second floor walls for the garage room ceiling structure.

First up, try and use auto roofs. Set all your floor/room ceiling defaults to 10'. Build Roof...Make Roof Baselines Polylines. You can now change your room ceiling heights to whatever you want. The roof heights will no longer be controlled by the ceiling height - because they are now controlled by the Roof Baseline Polyline.

Perry, That gives you my first pic. You get the insulation on the foundation wall. but you can't get the insulation on the footing. And you can't reduce the height of the footing to anything less than 100mm (about 4"), which gives you the footing under the insulation.

I can get this: or this: with an auto mono slab. The first one has the footing under the insulation. The second one doesn't have the chamfer.

That's the way it works. When you build auto framing, any manual framing work gets deleted. How would it work if your manual blocking remained while the rest of the wall framing changed - your blocking would not be correct anymore? And you can only auto generate 1 row of blocking at mid wall height.

Michael, Doesn't work on my machine. Wouldn't this be dependant on screen resolution? I know that using a custom line type from the library will muck that up because those line types get added to the bottom of the drop down list.

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.