LevisL

Haha. Unfortunately that won't be good enough for this project! If I was just doing work on the buildings, I might eyeball it, but the old wood retaining walls on this site (and there's a few of them) are starting to show their age and need to be replaced, so knowing the elevations will help me a lot. And that's just one of the site improvements they want to make on this project. Anyway, we're going out to fly the drone later today, so I'll have the elevation data. How I'm able to get that data into Chief will be the next challenge! I'm anticipating some hiccups, but hopefully nothing too bad. I have the booze ready in case I need a stiff drink or two after this!!

Thanks Rob. Yeah I was thinking along the same lines. I was planning on importing the terrain in a blank file and copying the buildings over once I got the terrain elevation cleaned up to where I'm happy.

I am working on a condo renovation project consisting of multiple buildings on a sloping site with retaining walls, etc. I haven't been able to locate an existing survey of the property and the condo association has not had any luck finding a surveyor willing to do one in a timely and cost efficient manner. Anyway, to make a long story short, I have someone willing to take an aerial drone survey of the site. They typically do field elevation mapping for farmland, so the drone has the capability to capture elevation data. I'm looking for advice/tips/best practices from anyone who has collected terrain elevation data in such a way to use in Chief. - Looking in Help and the Reference manual, it looks like we have a few options for importing data in a few different formats? Which one works better? txt? dxf/dwg? - Do you edit the data in other software or apps/websites prior to importing into Chief? - How do you handle the elevation data of non-terrain objects that the drone captures, like buildings, trees, etc.? - Any other tips or anything I should know/watch out for? Thanks in advance,

I was leaning towards the 16" at first, but then I went to an Apple Store and compared both side by side. I preferred the size and weight of the 14" for portability, especially when I use it for things other than Chief! Most of the time I use Chief with the external monitor anyway, unless I'm bringing it on site for as-built measuring or working while out of town visiting the in-laws! If the 16" would have a numeric keypad like most PC laptops of that size have, that might've swayed me towards it instead of the 14". I chose to save $500 instead!

@djhplanning I'm a bit late finding this thread, but if you're still looking, I'm running a 14" MacBook Pro with the M2 Max chip (32GB memory and 1TB hard drive) and this thing is slick and fast! Almost no lag whatsoever in Chief. Like @Michael_Gia, for me RTRT would be nice every once in a while, but con docs are my bread and butter, so I didn't feel the need to switch back to PC! I do a lot of standard renders with line drawings on top and those are near instant. When I'm in my office, I use it mostly in clamshell mode hooked up to the monitor in my signature below, and with both screens open when I need extra space or to use the webcam. I like the portability of the 14" laptop when on the road too. It's nice and thin and light.

Do you want a frame around the glass? If not, you can create it very quickly right in the door dbx. If you do want a frame around the glass, you could very easily create a door symbol out of a couple slabs or polyline solids.

Just sent you a P.M.

I went with the 32GB. So far so good, but I don't do a lot of PBR renders. I mostly use the standard renders and line drawing techniques and a lot of my work is con docs. That's all really fast with my M2 Max. If you do use PBR's a lot, you might want to up your memory. I just did some testing this morning on interior and exterior PBR's and they were generating in 10 seconds or less. I still don't have the magic touch to adjust the lighting, etc. on PBR's though, so I'm not posting my results on here! They're either too dark, too bright, or some materials look really weird/off!

I've been using my new MacBook M2 Max with X15 Beta for about a week now and so far so good. Rendering speed is very good compared to my 2020 iMac in the plans I've tested so far.

I’m assuming you mean SSA members of interiors? If so, I was wondering the same thing! We’ll definitely look into it. That appears to be the only option now if she’s not ready to fork out 2K/yr (and that’s not taking into account the exchange rate for us north of the border!)

I just recently started collaborating with an interior designer on a few projects. She uses Sketchup and I mentioned that she should look at switching to Chief Interiors so we can share files… is Interiors now discontinued with the switch to the annual subscription model? All the links to buy under Interiors and Kitchen & Bath on the Chief website lead to the Chief Premier purchase page @ $1,995/yr…

You are absolutely right. I was simply offering an alternative that works well for simple straight knee braces that is quicker and easier that messing with multiple copies of the same wood material at different angles!

Just a tip for those concerned with the direction of the wood grain on these knee braces – make them out of framing members instead of slabs/3D solids. They look much better in renderings! I make them out of a general framing member in plan view. You can miter the ends by drawing a CAD line across the framing member and using the trim function. Then convert it to a symbol and rotate it to stand up, just like @SNestor showed in his video. Here are 4 sizes I saved in my library for those who don't feel like making their own! Knee Braces.calibz (Made for X14)

I just ordered one as well. 14" MacBook Pro M2 Max. I can let you know in a couple weeks. I'm hoping it'll blow the 2020 iMac out of the water (I currently have the exact same machine as you@CoolHandLuke)!

One method I've used is to use a garage door raised off the floor with a large number of vertical panels to make it look like slats. Couple that with a slab or polyline solid manually placed at the top for the housing. Quick and easy, but not the most accurate for 3D renders. If all you need is a plan representation or 2D wall elevation, this is fine though. In this example, I used a 48" tall door, raised 48" off the floor with 32 vertical panels (48" ÷ 32 = 1.5" slats). Another option would be to use a louvered window and adjust the sash settings to give it a border similar to Mark's example above.

What I usually do (and what I've seen from plot plans prepared by surveyors) is dimension perpendicular to the property lines. For curves, I dimension towards the center point of the circle.

Gotcha. I just exported from X14. Thanks for doing that for the others that haven't upgraded yet.

What did you change Eric? I don't notice any difference from mine!

Good point Eric. I've added them to my first post.

I have macros for width, height and depth. They can be used with other objects too, not just doors. For a door label, you can either just add those two macros directly in your default label or add another macro that combines the two and make that your default label, which is what I did Formatted Macros.json

If you compare that to the clicks to change the pattern line weight and/or colour here for every view sent to layout, since we can't set our own defaults, then I call it a wash!

I have to disagree with that statement! Create an exterior elevation layer set in your template plan and customize it as you want with roof planes, walls, cross-section lines, etc. with a heavier line weight. It might be a bit more work to set up initially, maybe a couple hours, but do it once and then it'll be done. It's definitely not 10 times the work every time. You could take it a step further and create your 4 elevation cameras in your template and assign that layer set to them, so they'll be there every time you start a new plan. Even if you work on a plan that doesn't have that layerset, just import it from your template plan. For materials, if I'm not mistaken, most in the library come stock with a pattern line weight of 0, so not much to do there. I sometimes change the fill pattern colour to a lighter gray instead of black, but that's just a couple clicks per materials. If you use the same materials often and you don't want to change them every time, you can copy the manufacturer catalogs to your user catalog and edit the materials there.

Funny you should say that... I tried it this morning on a commercial reno plan I'm working on and I noticed a big difference in lineweights between 144 and 600 DPI. At 144 DPI, all lineweights look the same to me. This is viewing the pdf on screen only – haven't printed this to see how it looks on paper. Something has definitely changed from X13 to X14, at least on the Mac version, because when I created the pdf for this plan this morning, constisting of: - 11 pages 18x24" - one rendering on the cover page (standard camera sent to layout as image, not live view) - all the rest of the pages contain only plan views, plot line elevations, or schedules (no embedded pdf's) At 600 DPI, the file is 33.4MB. Even at 144 DPI, the size only goes down to 30.6MB... In comparison, another commercial plan I recently completed in X13, which had 26 pages of 24x36" (much larger building, with a couple embedded PDF's to boot), only resulted in a file size of 13.7MB at 600 DPI.

Yes it does!

Select only one roof plane and that tool/icon will show up. Click on it before selecting the second roof plane.