glennw

Without looking at the plan, the easy one is the display of the dashed footing lines are controlled by the Footings layer.

Chief knows if you are placing a door in an external wall or an internal wall - nothing to do with wall type - it's the location of the wall that matters (internal or external). If you place a door in an external wall it should follow the external door defaults - likewise for internal doors. To see better how this works, change the default, say, widths for interior (say, 1 foot wide) and exterior (say, 4 foot wide) doors and place both of them in internal and external walls and see what happens. If you are relying on the door preview in the Door Specification dbx, it will default to Exterior - this only relates to the side of the door displayed in the preview, which has an external side and an internal side - even though it may be located in an interior wall. You can spin the door preview around to see the other side of the door.

Rob, I don't think you can do it with a retaining wall. But you can do it with a normal pony wall. I wouldn't use a retaining wall anyway - usually better to use a normal wall and a Terrain Break

Look up Truss Base in help.

What is the problem?

You could use a Post To Beam railing and reduce the deck ceiling height to the overall height of your rail. Plus some other tweeks to get the sizes and configuration you want.

Not sure about Interiors. When you open a room or objects dbx, is there a Fill Style panel?

I would use auto roofs and build the popup on a new floor. That way, most things will happen automatically.

Build>Image>Create Billboard Image.

Or..... you can use the Create Billboard Image tool. It saves making a material. The billboard will display in a rendered view as long as textures are toggle on. It will display in a vector view with patterns toggled on or off.

Eric, This would only apply if in the General Wall Defaults, Resize About is set to Main Layer Outside. Here it is set to Wall Centre. When drawing walls with symmetrical wall layers, I usually define the wall with different line colors for inside and outside so that I can quickly tell which is which without selecting the wall - this helps a lot when you are scanning over a large floor plan looking for reversed walls.

Mark's way is different to mine. Mine used a single roof slope over the whole room (a shed roof) with flat ceiling on the upper part of the roof - resulting in an attic space above the flat ceiling. Mark used 2 different roof slopes to get the 2 ceiling planes with the ceiling planes following the roofs. Pick your poison. And the good thing is that there is usually more than 1 way to do something in Chief.

Tools>Schedules>Wall Schedule. Then this:

Set the room ceiling height to the hight where the sloping ceiling meets the external wall. Auto build the roof - it will build off that low ceiling height. Turn off auto build roofs Uncheck Flat Ceiling Over This Room Change the ceiling height to the height of the flat section of roof Click OK Check Flat Ceiling Over This Room Place your skylight in the roof.

@Rich_Winsor - Rich will always use a carriage return when it is not required!

I got this by changing my monitor from Scaled to Default For Display and then View Full Screen. I had the Active Layer Display dbx floating on the second monitor and when I dragged it back to the Chief window on the main monitor, all the toolbars reappeared and the screen looked normal.

While playing around with this menu problem I came across a cause of apparent tool bar corruption that may explain some users complaints of jumping tool bars. The drop down controls like Saved Plan View Control, Active Dimension Defaults Control, Active Layer Set Control and Active Default Set Control are sized to take the longest name in the list - even if that long name is not being used. This works on a per plan basis, so that if, in one plan, you have only short names, the drop down control will not be very wide. If you have at least 1 long name in another plan, the drop down control will be as wide as the longest name in the drop down control, even if a short name is displaying. If you open the 2 plans and switch between them, the overall toolbar widths will change according to the width of the drop down controls - they sometimes run out of room on the right hand side. This will look like the toolbars are jumping around - well..they are, because the toolbars are changing width to accommodate the different widths of the drop down controls.

That looks like a different problem (or different variation) that I have occasionally seen. Is this the same as you got last time. I thought the problem we are looking at is when the toolbars display OK. But the they run out of horizontal room and get mixed up. What you posted looks different again. While playing around just now, I got an error message saying my edit toolbar was corrupted and the edit menu would not display - I haven't seen that before.

It certainly is hard to get all the ducks lined up - a bit like herding cats!

Ed, Is it possible that once this happens once, the toolbar configuration is overwritten and this then prevents it from happening again using the same toolbar configuration - and this is why it is hard to duplicate in the same Chief session using the same toolbar configuration?

Ed, I just got it to happen as well. I have the toolbars unlocked. I went back over what I thought was the cause, bit couldn't duplicate the problem. I was dragging the Chief window to the second smaller monitor and then playing around with double clicking in the title bar to expand the window. I then messed with View>Enter Full Screen. I can't remember if I double clicked the title bar or not. I then dragged the window back to the main monitor and made the Chief window full screen. The horizontal toolbars were wonky. They seem to be remembering the width of the smaller monitor and not rearranging themselves on the different larger monitor. I will keep playing during the day.

Maybe a quick search in the help file would help.

Can you be a bit more clearer about what you are doing. Corner boards can be placed auto all in one go, or they can be placed individually. Are you trying to manually place them or auto? Are you using Drop Down toolbars or Child Tool Pallet? The Corner Boards icon will not show if it wasn't the last tool used. The drop down toolbars only show the last tool used from the dropdown. It may show Quoins (auto or manual), Corner Boards (auto or manual), or Molding Polyline or Molding Line.

Ed, I am trying to use both custom and OOB to see what happens. I can't see any difference at this stage.

Do you want to raise the roof and the ceiling? If so turn on auto roofs. Open the porch room dbx and change the ceiling height.