LevisL

I just discovered last night that when you set a railing wall to 'Follow Stairs', where the height gets calculated from seems wrong to me. Our Canadian Building Code specifies that the height is to be calculated from the tip/tangent point of the nosing. After sending this to tech. support, they replied to me that Chief calculates it from the back of the tread and sent me this image. Just curious what the IRC/IBC says for you folks in the States? If your code is similar to ours, maybe we can get Chief to change this setting.

Perfect. Thanks!

I guess you were right. That's what I'm finding out. Solves one problem but creates others. I was hoping for a setting in the cabinet dbx that I was missing or something easy like that, but I guess I'll follow Eric's advice after all! Thanks everyone.

Still no. Deleting surfaces again also deletes some wanted surfaces at the same time. They must join when converting to a symbol.

Unfortunately not. I can delete the surfaces and get the look I'm after in the camera view, but when I convert it to a symbol, some of the surfaces show up again...

I'm trying to replicate an existing base cabinet in a reno project I'm working on, but I can't figure this one out! It's a 12" wide radius end with open shelves, as this picture shows. In Chief, I can only get a fully open radius end if I make the base cabinet 24" wide. Anything less than 24", the straight edge gets closed off. Any way to get rid of that? I tried making customizing the left side, but that didn't accomplish anything.

Mick, it's measured from the baselines going the other way.

Here's one I did last week for a reno/addition project, along with the settings I used. Mercier Residence - Concept 1.1 - 720p.mov I brought the resolution down a bit for this one to be able to upload it on here, but I typically use 1920x1080 and email my clients a Dropbox link, since the file gets quite large. I found 30 seconds to be a good clip length at 15fps. It's a good balance between decent file size and not too choppy... plus the longer the clip and more fps, the longer it takes to record. For the average size of houses I do around here, I also found that the best circle radius for me is somewhere around 70 to 80ft. Obviously if you do larger houses or commercial buildings, that will need to be larger.

No problem! Glad to help. I have to say though... I might switch to Glenn's method! No need to sit around and wait for the walkthrough to record. And this is impressive! Might have to look into this as well

Draw a CAD circle around your house and convert it to a walkthrough path. Set the camera angle to ‘Relative to path’ and 270º. This will make the camera face towards the center of the circle. Play around with the height to get it to your liking and you’ll be good to go. I do these 360 videos all the time. I keep the height consistent all the way around though. I can post an example and my settings when I’m at my computer later if you want.

Jason, I like my layout pages to line up the same way you’re describing and there’s an easier way to accomplish what you want, especially if you already use saved plan views. Just copy the layout view and paste-hold-position on the next page. Then open the layout view and change to another saved plan view. You can now duplicate layout pages too.

And here's what I started with: And the edits I had to do!

I feel your pain Bob! Unfortunately, the 'Walls, Main Layer Only' only works for plan views, not camera views. I spent time with tech. support a couple years ago trying to figure out a way to do the same thing you're trying. In short, we can't do it automatically yet. Here's what I do now to create a foundation overview: 1. Take an ORTHOGRAPHIC (not perspective) floor overview camera view showing only the foundation (terrain off, etc.) 2. Switch to an isometric view (3D>Isometric View>Take your pick!) 3. Use the 'Delete Surfaces' tool to delete any unwanted items, like the upper portion of pony walls 4. Create a 'CAD Detail from View' 5. Open the CAD detail and edit as needed (ensure the 'CAD_ Default_Lines' and 'CAD_ Default_Patterns' layers are turned on) The reason I use an orthographic camera as opposed to perspective is that the CAD detail will then be to scale, so it's a lot easier to do the needed edits. I find I usually need to do some editing anyways, especially for ICF foundations, so this method works alright for me. Depending on the size and complexity of the foundation, it can take me anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to get it all cleaned up in the CAD detail. Here's an example of one I did recently Hope this helps!

Good to know. I'll keep trying to figure out what the issue is. Same here. The only problems I have are with the MacBook. My 2013 iMac still runs great.

I've been monitoring memory usage for the past couple days when I'm using the laptop and right now I'm running very similar to you. CA, browser, and e-mail open and I'm at around 4.6 to 4.8GB used. I have Dropbox and Remote PC running in the background as well. The other day when it showed 6.7GB used, my wife's account had apps open as well and I had just switched users without logging out of her account. That being said, I'm still getting lots of crashes generating section/elevation cameras. Memory usage doesn't spike when crashes happen. Sometimes CA freezes on a white screen with the spinning rainbow wheel (not responding). Other times it shuts down suddenly. I can usually open 1 or 2 section cameras no problem. Then it crashes on subsequent attempts, even if I close the first ones beforehand. Here's a screenshot showing the first part of the crash report the last time it shut down suddenly on me.

You can also use Sketchup to do some 3D lettering and import it as a symbol into Chief. Here are a few examples I just did last week.

Thanks Graham. I updated to Catalina just a couple days ago, which may have worsened the problem, but it was definitely happening before that. As for my preferences in CA, it does recognize the chip and Open GL version. As a test, I ran the activity monitor side-by-side with CA to see if the RAM was maxing out when a crash happened, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. I haven't found anywhere where I can adjust the Iris Plus settings outside of CA. I'll do more research and report back.

I bought a new MacBook Pro this summer as a secondary machine for the times I'm out of my office and away from my iMac. I opted for the 13" model rather than the 15" for several reasons, but mainly for portability and price difference. I knew going into this that I would probably feel a performance hit by only having the Intel Integrated graphics, but I thought it would be livable (e.g.: I wasn't expecting to be able to use it for PBR's and other renderings with lots of lights and shadows). Anyway, after a couple months of using this machine, I'm finding I get a lot of crashes generating section/elevation camera views with the vector view rendering style. This is a big part of creating con docs, so this is a bigger problem than expected. Perspective cameras using the standard rendering style don't seem to be a problem though. I've spoken to tech. support about it and they're saying it's due to the integrated graphics. They had me play around with the render preferences (uncheck global illumination, etc.), but that hasn't helped. I'm just curious if there's any other MacBook Pro users with just the Intel graphics that have similar issues and/or what you've done to address it. I'm hoping I don't need to trade this machine in just yet.

I got it to work, but there still seems to be a bug with the square fascia. When you select it in section view, the selection still shows as a plumb fascia, so I'm guessing that's why the truss tail is not generating properly. To get it to work, I edited the overhang portion of truss envelope in section view, then I trimmed it with a cad line in the truss detail. TrussTest.plan

And the number of stringers is restrictive as well. We should be able to specify how many stringers we want and/or their max. spacing.

There's a few in the Vintage Industrial No.1 Bonus Library. https://www.chiefarchitect.com/3d-library/index.php?r=site/library&category=Furniture

No problem! Actually, you can see the effect in plan view. Just toggle the 'Line Weights' icon on. I usually leave mine 'on' unless I need to do more intricate detailing and the line weights get in the way of being accurate. Also, when I send a view to layout, I always check 'Use Layout Line Scaling' below the scale. This way the line weights and dash lengths look consistent from one view to the other, regardless of scale And lastly, it helps if your drawing sheet setup in both plan and layout both have the same line weight settings. I use 1 = 1/100mm, which I think is the default. I know @dshall and I had a gotomeeting last year where we played around with the line weight settings in plan that were different than in layout and we had some odd results.

That almost looks to me like you have a really heavy lineweight for your legend borders.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you on that one! I never changed my background color from the default. I also don't use the Dark Mode introduced with the release of Mojave.

Here's one of mine from a little while back! I think the bug is when the images have a transparent background from what I can tell.