glennw

Draw your cased opening the full width. Draw a section of railing close by and define it as No Room Definition. Drag the railing wall section into the cased opening.

At a first quick look it would appear that there is not enough information to draw this. Did you draw this with only the information supplied? Do you know the angle of the upper shaded polygon? or...do you know the width of the lower polygon and the location of the horizontal line that runs through it? Are you familiar with the Enter Coordinates, Input Line and Input Point tools? - have a look in the help file. Notice that the Input Line and Input Point tools have a next button.

Use a Wall Material Region to form the arched recess - with Cut Finished Layers of Parent Object checked. Place a window under the Wall Material Region. Here is a very quick one.

A plan might help instead of us having to reinvent the wheel. I haven't got a clue what a "dog trot" is.

For the regular shaped ones use Boxes, arrange as needed and then convert to a block or symbol. For the tapered base one use a Truncated Pyramid for the base and boxes for the regular shapes.

Just a heads up. No Locate walls have no effect on wether a room is defined or not. That setting stops auto exterior dimensions from dimensioning to the wall. Instead, you probably need No Room Definition to prevent a room from forming.

Just thinking about this a bit more and being mindful that you really don't seem to need the functions of the Find Plan Assistant. You may be better using Explorer to get something like the picture below instead of trying to do it in Chief. I am a Mac user so we don't see a thumbnail, but you should see the thumbnail in Windows - do you still use Explorer? It's been a while since I used windows! You should see your thumbnail in Explorer instead of the image we see on a mac.

Preferences>General>File Management>Thumbnail Images>Small or Large. If this is toggled on, a thumbnail image is created when you FIRST save the file. You can also create a custom image like a 3D view or a floor plan at any time. Set up the screen to display what you want and then go File>Save Thumbnail Image. Save the plan and update the Plan Database. If you are using Windows, the thumbnail should also display as the file icon - but pretty useless for plan identification. The thumbnail in the Plan Database is pretty useless as well. It needs to be larger and clearer.

Have a look here for global macros.

Yes, you can do that with a Wall Material Region with Cut Finish Layers of Parent Object toggled on. This will cut an actual groove in the wall layers. You don't define them in the wall definition, you draw them using the Wall Material Region tool. You can draw them in either plan or a 3D view - an elevation view is probably the easiest.

Do you mean place the marker and text automatically? Or do you mean place the text on a marker automatically? - It looks like this is what you did. You can save the marker to the library and you can copy/paste from room to room.

Open the camera dbx and have a look at Scene Clipping. Make sure Clip Sides is unchecked and enter a Clip Width. The clip width is the width of the cross section line. In your case when you want the cross section linee to disappear, enter zero - although Chief will change it to the minimum which is 50mm in metric. This does not affect the scene clipping (only the width of the cross section line) as long as Clip Sides is unchecked. Or...easier still, you can select the camera and drag the grips on the ends of the cross section line in towards the camera.

Brad, The height of the foundation wall you show in your last picture is controlled by the Stem Wall height in the foundation room db - this will move all of the rooms footings. Or...you can do a Cross Section/Elevation view looking at the wall, select the wall and change the temp dim to the height you want - this will do a single wall. Thanks for the heads up on the foundation offset Michael. Brad & Russ, is this getting close to what you want? Mostly done auto with a few manual tweaks.

It's new to X15.

I can get this far with auto. The only thing I haven't done is the slab overhang. I will keep playing with that one. Have a look at Railing Specification>Rail Style>Specify Railing>Horizontal Offset. This offsets all the railing parts like railings, posts, beams.

3D Molding Polyline. You can match the slope of the stair by getting the Rise Angle from the stair dbx.

Ah.

In the framing defaults?

Your floor plan is on the attic floor. You need to move the view down a floor. Up on the top toolbar is an A with arrows either side. Press the down arrow.

You can use a 3D Molding Polyline with 2 moldings applied - one rectangular for the shelf and one round for the rail. The shelf and the rail will be accounted for separately in the material List. Although you can make them report as one item if you Make Stack. You can achieve an angled end (not sure about the dog leg though) by adding an extra piece of molding line, marking it No Molding On Selected Edge and then dragging the end around. Save it to the library.

Joe, I usually trace over the supplied contours using Elevation Splines. Place your Elevation Splines at their true height above sea level. Then use the Subfloor Height Above Terrain to relate your structure to the Elevation Spline heights. This will give you the Chief contours in heights relative to sea level, but will leave the heights in the Chief model related to zero. You can set things up so that the Chief model heights are also relative to sea level, but I am assuming that is not what you want and I really wouldn't recommend doing it that way.

"Mac OSX has roots in BSD and the Unix world. In Unix drives are not marked by special letters; instead the top level of the OS is marked by the root symbol /, and any other drives are mounted (attached to the system) as a subdirectory of the root system. No letters at all."

Chopsaw, It looks like the OP is on a mac. My Preferences Folder is /Users/glennwoodward/.config/Chief Architect Inc

There are probably several ways to do what you want. I suspect that the Make Parallel tool may not be the most appropriate one in this case. Try this one using a dimension. Draw an Angular Dimension so that it results in an angle between a vertical reference line and the controlling side of your polyline. Group select the objects you want to rotate. Click on the angular dimension text and a Set Angular Dimension dbx will open. Enter zero. All your objects will rotate the desired amount. Or...even simpler, you can set the Additional Angles to the rotation angle you want, group select the objects, and use the rotation grip to rotate all the objects to the Angle Snaps value.

Very easy to do what you want Have you looked up Make Parallel/Perpendicular in help? If so, what is not working?