Nicinus

This feels like something that has been discussed a lot, but I couldn't find anything either in this or the old forum, but perhaps I'm searching on the wrong words.

Anyhow, while in a 3D view when I orbit around my design, I often find the whole view 'shooting away'. After this happens I usually can't recover or find it again, and if I do it is typically heavily distorted. A couple of times I've zeroed some of the values in the camera dbx, but this is cumbersome and not always successful. Is there a button or short cut to reset the 3D camera?

Nice, did not know about the Select Same Tool, that helps.  

I would assume that you do not want your text to rotate as it is probably drawn horizontally and that is probably how you want it to remain - so don't select it.

I didn't dare to try deselect anything, but even if I could pin all those small labels, they would be in the wrong place after rotating the whole plan, wouldn't it?

It does bring up another question, is there a way to select similar objects? Like I select a room label or a furniture and can then select all of the same type? Revit has a useful 'Select similar' option, and also a filter that lets you select a range of objects and then choose which ones you keep in the selection.

I did use the Edit Area All Floors and had all All On Set, and then rotated 90 and it seems to have worked. Except for the room labels.

I hear you, won't do that mistake again. It's just that I mentally like to have the front of the house downwards.

I read about the Rotate Plan View command, and it seems more like a purely visual guide, it says it doesn't rotate objects but only the view as I see it on screen. That may be where previous comments about less precision comes from, if it is rdrawing everything at an angle. Either way, could be a very useful tool if one could switch it on an off with a button on the sidebar. Could then be set to either front being south or true north. It does not seem like I would like to work in this mode.

Since I don't want to redraw my work I guess I have to look at Edit Area then. This didn't seem to work completely for me though. What can I do more than have all layers visible and choosing All floors?

But does that one affect room labels? Can't seem to get that to work.

However, the Rotate Plan View does not seem to be what I'm looking for. I noticed if I try to adjust an object with the arrows and nudge upwards, the object now goes to the left.    I would go crazy if I had to develop the plan like that. How can I rotate permanently?

Not sure I know where I do that. This option is available in the text field if I click on a room label, but it is greyed out. Under the grey it is indeed checked though, but the room label did not rotate.

I started out doing a plan in portrait mode as I typically work with the front door down. However, for the construction documents it make more sense to have everything in portrait.

What is the best way of rotating your work 90 degrees? I've searched the old forum and is seems as if Rotate plan view have some issues, and the recommended way is to use Edit Area/All floors?

I'm asking since I don't want to go ahead and then have issues later on if I can avoid it. I seem to remember some warnings that precision could be lost with one of the methods? I also noted that neither method rotated my text. :/

I just gave him one so he's all set!

I just gave you one,   Look at the members list.... Anyone who has a Surface Pro deserves a 'bump' in their reputation! 

Thanks, I enjoyed it so much I gave you one right back!    It only seems to apply to the individual post, is the member list the only way to see how many one has collected?

An alternate  e-mail is all that is needed to create another 'sign-on ID' on CA and booster your main ID's reputation points!  That in itself renders the system inert, void, and worthless!

Where can you see reputation points? I obviously don't have any since I can't see them, but still?  

I thought I wasn't allowed to post the other day as well, but it turned out I wasn't logged in. This new system seems to kick me out all the time whereas I don't remember logging very often in the old one, it just remembered me somehow. Maybe there is a cookie issue.

The real question is does it look good when printed?

That's for sure. I'm also very new at this and may be doing scaling mistakes when sending to Layout. I will continue to tinker and see if I can figure it out.

Thanks all for your feedback.

I'm not talking monitor, just printed to PDF.

Me too. That's the thing with pdfs, they are a file in a vector based format, written in a language called postscript that defines circles, fonts, etc, instead of saving them as an image/bitmap.

You can zoom in on anything real close and get pixilation , we are talking about printing and 300 dpi hasn't gave me any problems. Check out Doug's post.

Not in vector graphics. Choose a text and zoom in as much as you can, it will always stay sharp in your pdf.

The issue is the CAD block that represents the symbol you are printing. The Circe that was created was likely derived from the 3D data. If you do a top down view in 3D you should be able to verify this.

Ok, that makes sense. Still, what I don't get is the wobbliness of the lines? Even if it is created by a 3D object that object is also conformed by vectors, right? I understand that a curve has visible segments but it should still be clean in my mind. Have a look at similar example from Revit. I've also included an Archicad example but they use another route.

The first one is a sample chief scene I downloaded, the second ARchicad and the last one Revit. These are all from my previous work so I know they are 3D objects as well, but in Archicad's case the 3D symbol includes a 2D version that is substituted in plans, creating extremely clean drawings.

Are you using Chief's built in PDF or another PDF program. I use adobe and never have any problems using 300 dpi (24x36) but you should be able to use 100 and still be good. That setting really doesn't do anything unless you plan on printing an extra large size print.. What you see on the monitor is 92 dpi and is all you need for that

It doesn't seem to be that simple. Have a look at the below images, one printed at 4000 and the other at 72 dpi. Looking at these examples the difference is dramatic, and all in the quality of the actual curve and how it is drawn. If I would print from Illustrator and have a really low dpi setting those curves would start to look pixelated like an antialiasing problem, but here the setting really affects the definition of the curve itself. As you can see the lines themselves are very crisp.

This then gets accentuated when one starts to add line weight, all these examples are with the line weight being 1. 

 

Some objects in Chief's Library are not perfect circles like a CAD circle would be.  In the attached image, look at the CAD circle compared to some of Chief's symbols.

This .pdf was printed at 4000 dpi and 24x36, the highest resolution I can create.

 

This I don't understand, how was the circle in the symbol created then if not with the CAD tools?

Not a problem at all, Greg, I'm grateful for all help and suggestions. You are talking about something different though, and what can happen after a pdf has been created and if you want to convert that pdf to an image. My issues are in the creation of the actual pdf. The pdfs created by CAD software is typically in vector format, as opposed to for example Photoshop that handles images and bitmaps.

Electormen, while I don't pretend to understand all of this I did program some stuff in postscript when I was younger. Normally a vector program like Chief translates it's info into postscript for a resolution independent pdf. For all typical purposes dots and pixels are the same for a computer. Dpi in this case (Chief) really seems to relate more to the interpolation of curves, and the quality difference is dramatic in 72 dpi compared to 4000 if you zoom in. However, Chief is not converting everything into a bitmap when creating pdfs. As you say yourself, a 300pdi Arch D would be 78Mpixels, or about a 624MB uncompressed grayscale file, which even with 99% compressed would be 6.24MB. My 4000 dpi Arch D pdf is 178Kb and if you zoom in on for example text you can see that no matter how much you zoom in, the text is perfect, no pixelization. Same goes for a CAD circle (which has been defined as a circle). Everything else that uses curves is dependent on interpolation, i.e. how many segments the curve consists of. 

Back to Chief. Symbols and architectural blocks are highly dependent on the dpi setting and my results got better when I chose 4000. I'm not using any bitmaps though and can imagine that this would possibly generate large files. It seems as if one of my questions on why two pages looks so different is related to scaling of line weight, since when I look at the object properties the annotation set is the same. However, there does not seem to be a way to see what scaling line weight was used after it has been sent? I can't find anything that seems to relate in properties. This seems to indicate that I would really have to tailor to specific printers, whereas I would like to create one high quality Arch D pdf and be done with it.

It's probably partially me not understanding some of the concepts, but I see these issues already in Layout, even before it's been sent to print/pdf. Have a look at the below for some line work I believe should be better.

Maybe it's the internal precision in Chief, if you look at this zoom of a roof edge, some of the lines goes of in another direction. It may seem picky, but it does distract a clean drawing.

It seems to me that it is related to line weight and the way Chief simulates thicker lines. I used the override of a line weight of 1 and everything looks more straight and circles more round as below. I did run into another issue though, where I seem to have sent two pages differently, as one is hair light and the other somewhat thicker. Both are drawn without jaggedness though, but I can't figure out what I made different. I've included the layout file if anyone would care to take a look at what is different between page 1 and 2? Looking at some of the lines I would guess they have different annotation sets or scale, but I can't figure out where I can find that info in Layout and both takes me to the same view if I double click them.

Test.layout

Just to make sure I looked in another PDF viewer and it is the same, it's definitely the way it comes from Chief.

Scaling issue perhaps? I send to layout with 1/8" - 1'.

I don't understand how I set the resolution in Chief in order to get proper line quality. I'm working on my plan, exporting it to Layout on an Arch D, and then printing to pdf where I examine the result. I used 4000dpi which was the highest setting but the result is unimpressive to say the least, so I assume I'm doing something wrong. I've attached two screen shots of zooms on the pdf, one showing a jerky dining table coming from the library, and the other a crooked angled line of a roof outline. What gives?

When I choose a new layout I get the info "This file was generated by a pre-release or beta version. If you have problems reading this plan, open and then save it in a release version."

I did select save, but I still get this message every time I start layout, even if it is the first thing I do without a plan loaded. Chief then typically crashes when I start using it and freezes the machine. Last time I rebooted because of this my machine froze just by starting Chief. After this I reinstalled Chief with the repair option, and although Chief now starts properly, I still get the info about the layout file having been generated by a pre-release or beta.

It seems to me as if a reinstall didn't flush out the old template files or something, and that there is a corrupt file somewhere? Since apparently a reinstall gave me new template files, where can I find those? I would have called support about this if it weren't for the weekend, and I need to get some stuff done. Anyone bumped into this problem?

Nic 

Ok, I will bow to the common wisdom, pdf it is!