glennw

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.

The Fireplace tool is still available.

Ed, I have been playing around a bit and can duplicate the toolbar problem - but only occasionally. I will keep trying. This is just a bit of a rave as things come up. Do we need to move this subject to a different thread or is it OK to continue here? At one stage I thought the problem maybe related to having an imperial plan opened at the same time as my metric plans - but nothing repeatable. One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the wonky toolbar definitions are saved and remain wonky so that you cannot just change back to the original definition. One thing that I have noticed is that the toolbars can move around when you have 2 plans open, which use different layer set names, different default dimension names or different default set names. I especially run into this when I open some one else's plan that may have longer names for these items in the dropdown box. A long name can push all the tools along to the right (sometimes off the screen) as you switch from one plan to the other. Another thing I noticed after Reseting Toolbars was this tool bar titled Time Tracker. It contains a couple of Plan View tools that don't work, along with some other tools that look like they don't belong there. There are duplicate Plan View tools in their own toolbar that do work. Any ideas?

You can do this auto with Build Roof>Options>Eaves>Length. Increase this value so that it is longer than the roof. It will only take the same material as the fascia though.