ebdesign

Tantrim, I wouldn't get hung up on the framing until I had all the roofs & ceilings just the way I want them. Including specifying the framing for each roof & ceiling plane. Auto roofs can take you a very long ways, but eventually you gotta take over. Be sure to use the 'join roofs" for any edited roof planes. If you know you're going to use trusses in an area, then define the framing members of the roof & cl'g planes w/ what you're gonna use for top/bot truss chords. Build the trusses 1st. Your 1st truss needs a roof & cl'g plane to be built. After that, you can edit the truss envelope (in a section camera; not the CAD Detail) & lock your edits & place the truss on the moon if you want to. It'll still be a truss. Floor & ceiling framing can be edited, copy/pasted, moved up/down & will stay where you put them; but you're done having Chief rebuild w/out losing your changes. Roof rafters & sloped ceiling joists can be edited etc also, but you must deselect "Automatic Height" or they will jump up/down on you. They will retain their slope, even when moved completely away from the cl'g or roof plane they came from. So you can get a lot of tricky overframing done w/out having ALL the roof & cl'g planes actually built. You can also create copies of the plan, work on a specific area, let Chief frame it, & then copy/paste hold to "real" plan.

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Perry, Come to my office and I will teach you all sorts of funky things.

Looks OK here at a quick glance. Weird.

May be aware of this already, but for those that aren't: When you need a wall to extend beyond an intersecting wall & Chief won't allow it, lengthen the wall well beyond what you want, draw a room divider wall off the end of the wall & then use dimensions to locate the wall precisely beyond the end of intersecting wall.

That is correct, Rob in that specific situation. There is a min extension req to have the wall extend beyond the intersecting wall. I think it is dependent on the intersecting wall type thickness. Something like that.

It would be nice if we could enter absolute or room specific hgts directly as well as the "lock top/bot" in the dbx. Sometimes that would be easier than dealing w/ the room cl'g hgt as plate hgt. We can lock the length of any wall or change the length from start/end/center in the Wall/General tab.

Leaving the wall at default top/bot allows the wall to be rebuilt to the new hgts if/when the room def changes. & there are other situations that I've gotten myself into where I need to keep the wall as/is but change the room def. To keep Chief from changing the hgts, I often do exactly what you have described, drag the wall up/down, then drag it back exactly where it was. It would be nice if we could just deselect Default Wall Hgts in the Structure tab instead of having to drag the wall.........

If objects can be blocked together, the "make block" icon should appear in the edit toolbar. It is possible to mull multiple doors & windows together- more than 2. But I do get the puzzling "openings must be w/in ........." notice once in awhile. Usually selecting them in a different sequence will get around that, or creating "minor" blocks & then blocking all together.

You forget Scott, that I am "in" Cali. But Cali is a very very big state & I am only familiar w/ how this issue is dealt w/ in jurisdictions in & around LA & SF.

I thought it would have been measured from a single hi/lo or average natural grade to highest point of roof; average roof hgt, or something like that. I've never had to do it any other way. My mistake.

You can probably get the same info from a simple elevation outside the terrain perimeter.

Yes I did.

OMG. Here's the exact same plan in the exact same layer set w/ Rooms layer off & floor surfaces layer on. Just like the last image I posted. WTH!?

Yeah, I know that's right Scott. It was not 100% reliable in the past. I haven't revisited it in a while though. &, I haven't found a case where it doesn't work yet this morning. It might have got fixed recently w/ one of the upgrades & nobody noticed it. "They" do that to us, you know.

Eureka! Good one, Rob. Perfect. Hope it works 100% of the time. Thank you very much. I can quit adding a 3/4" sub-flr sheeting slab now. &........ there's another function of the "Rooms" layer.

Pony Walls.

Sure, Curtis, that's what I'm looking for. But, this is what I get. 3D Framing Set layer set/ Floor surfaces layer on. When I turn Floor surfaces layer off, no sub-floor there. Got any suggestions?

I do turn that layer off when I don't want to see material pattern lines in any vector camera.

Foundation- Turns the foundation flr display off in any camera, inc a floor camera displaying the foundation flr- nothing there. Patterns, 3D Views is another layer that does not show +. Rooms layer can be locked so that a room cannot be selected, but displayed or not doesn't seem to matter as long as the layer is not locked. Rooms can be selected either way, so don't understand that. Floor Surfaces- I've yet to figure out how to only show the subfloor sheeting in a framing view. "0" & "Defpoints" come from dwg imports of some sort. They're part of most dwgs I get. I always deselect those layers to import if I can.. & they can be buggers to track down & get rid of.

Are the walls at default top & bottom? Select the gable wall & in the structure tab, select "balloon thru cl'g". Then you have one wall. The attic wall should disappear & you will be able to place your windows where you want.

If you're opening a plan that was started in earlier versions, that layer may be named "Walls, Beams".

Thanks Phyllis. Nice!

Thanks folks. It's working now. It was not plan specific or anything like that. Maybe it was just waiting for me to send into TS. That's happened to me a couple x's before. I send it in, they reply that they don't see a problem, so I try it again & all is well. I have no clue what was going on. Next time I won't wait 2 days to send it in.

Is it working? The last couple x's I've tried to do this, it takes soooooo long, I finally give up. Is it working? How long should it take? My task manager says Chief is "Not Repsonding". The progress bar isn't moving- or very very slowly, but the surface count continues to rise. seems like a lot of surfaces for flr0. It's just a slab at top of 48" stem wall. ??