misterwiley

I'm trying to add a brick guardrail or half wall to the outside of these exterior brick stairs with a 3" concrete cap. Kind of like the attached picture but I've got a landing in the mix. I've tried a standard railing that follows the stairs but when I select it as a solid railing that follows stairs, the railing just seems to disappear. How would I go about making this guard rail with concrete cap and have all the surrounding brick look smooth? Thanks in advance for any advice. 387 Kimberly Ave - Concept #2.plan

In my case I measure a lot of existing homes and need to draw the existing structures. I find that in 100 year old homes the casing width will vary so much between rooms and that measurements to the outside of the casing isn't as accurate unless I measure every windows casing width size whereas if I measure to the inside of the casing and between inside of casing I get better numbers overall and more accurate existing window/door locations and don't have to keep up with all the different casing widths. Honestly this is just a matter of preference to me that saves a lot of extra measureing, note taking, and plugging existing data into Chief. Might not be the best method but it seems to work for me provided I can get Chief to cooperate.

Thanks for helping me look into this guys. All I can seem to snap to is the outside of the 3/4" frame on windows or the rough opening which I can chose in the framing tab of the window dbx. Very strangely I got this working on doors because the rough opening seems to be taken from the inside of the door frame, where a 0" side rough opening would be the inside of the frame and anything added to the side rough opening would push the snap away from the frame. So only with doors if you select a 1/4" revel on your casing and a 1/4" rough opening on the sides for that door, you can then snap the dimension to the rough opening which, in this case, is the inside of the casing on the revel over the jamb frame. Windows work the way I would have thought this function would have worked where the rough opening starts from the outside of the jamb frame at 0 and goes out when you increase the side rough opening in the framing tab of the window dbx. So windows and doors side rough opening are being calculated in different manners which is very confusing to me. I only have rough opening and sides selected on my locate objects dbx

I'm trying to get my manual dimension tool to snap to the inside of the casing on windows and doors because I took all my existing number to a from there. Toggling the (Located Objects -> Openings -> Casing) only allows to the outside of the casing as shown below but wont snap to the other side of the casing. Anything I might be over looking?

I believe it would be easiest to create a roof plane with a pitch of 0, a baseline height of your desired ceiling height, and then modify the structure of the roof plane to only include one material of concrete set to the desired thickness. Then you can modify the roof plane boundary lines in plan view to overhang your building as desired.

I'm actually going through this right now in North Carolina. Bathrooms and tight areas such as closets or small storage room areas will get turned down here. Laundry rooms are OK if the room is big enough and you can easily access the panel. Meaning you can't put the panel behind the washer and dryer even if they are on the floor and especially if they are stacked on-top of each other. Other then that just the basics of no higher then 6'-7" off the floor, well lite, and min. 3 ft square clear from walls. To be safe I like to put the panel on the opposite wall as the washer and dryer but as long as you can fully stand in front of the panel it is OK to be on the same or adjacent wall.

So you guys save a .plan file for every custom symbol you create? Or is it better to save the working part as a "architecture block" and add that to the library since you can then load that block back from the library, explode it, and make corrections if need be? Seems like either method could get a little cluttered.

Nice solution Eric. Thank you!

I know how to get the exterior casing to recesses to the main wall layer but I would like the interior casing to the same-thing. Can this be done?

Thank you! I hadn't realized you needed to create a symbol of your p-solid and then that could be turned into a door. I was trying to get my p-solid to work as a door with the "convert to" or the "add to library" tools without luck. Just missed a step. Cheers!

I'm looking into building a custom gate that operates as a normal door in Chief. Are there any tutorials out there that y'all know of?

Gary, Thank you for your video! That is definitely a work around, however tedious it may be, still very clever. Still seems like Chief would be able to add a function to the program that could easily accomplish what we are after. I'll let you know if I ever come up with another work around. Cheers!

This seems like a very simple feature that chief is purposefully keeps us from being able to use...at least the ability to convert a terrain to a solid would be reasonable.

So I'm working on this and was able to export my terrain as a .dae file and then convert it to a .obj file which then got me a symbol of my terrain in chief architect. But now i'm back to square one with trying to convert a symbol into a p-solid.

Seems like it. I just watch this video from a user here on the forums which was helpful in telling me what I need to do. Basically I need to convert my terrain into a p-solid and then into a plan solid in order to do the 3D subtraction correctly. Does anyone know how to convert your terrain w/ elevation information into a p-solid and then into a solid?

I've got a project where we are going to be building a 100' +/- retaining wall off the back of a house in order to back fill the yard to create a level pad for the client to play soccer on. I currently have a pretty accurate 3D model of the existing terrain that I got using a normal rotary laser and flags placed on the ground in a 5'x5' grid in order to gather around 100 elevation points at the flag locations. This worked well. My question now is can chief some how tell me the fill volume of the back yard if I go out level from the house say 15-20'? It seems like maybe one could convert the as-built terrain into a p-solid, then create another p-solid over that terrain and use the subtraction tool to remove the existing terrain from the new p-solid. This would then in theory leave you with a p-solid that represents the negative of the existing terrain/ or in other words....the fill volume. I'm not 100% sure how to go about this and was wondering if anyone here as done something similar or sees a reason why this would not work in chief.

oh duh, thank you Eric.

I'm wondering if any of you chief gurus know how to slope a floor so that I can get my head room for the stair below? I would like the floor of my closet to follow the pitch of my stairs below. Any thoughts? I was able to to create a invisible room above and change the floor height but that is not ideal for me since I know a carpenter can frame the floor at a slope which would maximize head room and closet space.

Or perhaps this might be a easier solution that someone knows off the top of their head. I've given up on framing and just want the finished 3D look now. I have the exterior looking the way I want here but I can't get the interior attic wall to cut to the curve of the roof. See the two attached photos. Any thoughts?

Hey y'all first time posting here. I've run into a little issue with trying to get my framing to generate correctly when I check the options "Roof Cuts Wall at Bottom" and "Stop at Ceiling Above" on a Attic wall. The framing seems to still bollon on up through the ceiling plane that I've created and into the bottom of the roof plane. See attached image (I highlighted the problem framing in gray). Is there a setting or a ceiling/roof plane location that I'm simply over looking to allow the framing to stop on the bottom of the truss like the two attic walls on either side? Or do I just need to fix all this framing manually? The attached pictures and plan are a quick representation of the problem I'm describing. Thanks for any help. Plan file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EEbqfnu_oxFnarijfaYnJ30i7gcpVKck