Rich_Winsor

Well see, there you go. I knew it was a trick question. Why on earth would anybody use the "Rotate Plan View" tool to rotate the plan view? BTW, I strongly advise not using my suggestions too.

Wow, how magnanimous. $200 off on a $14,500 rig and a two week build time to boot. I won't go a penny higher than 14K and I want it by Friday. Seriously there have been several threads on this topic. A search of the forums for "upgrades" will lead you to some of them. This was one of the better ones. https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/504-best-computer-for-running-cheif/?hl=upgrade

Like this?

This project is a non-denominational interdisciplinary undertaking. The original concept was conceived with a #2 pencil on a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 graph paper. I took that original and deciphered it with AutoCAD to get a workable as built and proposed floor plan. Feeling the need for 3D details I started creating a 3D framing model with SolidWorks. While this was fine for the type of details pictured it was a laborious process which had me looking for a better solution for producing a complete framing model. This led to the purchase of Home Designer Pro. Now while Pro was probably all the program I really needed for this project Chief kept bombarding me with offers to upgrade to Chief Premier until finally in a moment of weakness I caved in and bought the whole enchilada. And that in a nutshell is how I arrived here.

Beckham? ...... Beckham? Oh yeah, you mean Mr. Posh Spice. There is another Beckham playing football now and last night he gave new meaning to "Bend it like Beckham" with a catch that is being called the greatest of all time by many. http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york-giants/post/_/id/40499/giants-odell-beckham-jr-makes-incredible-one-handed-touchdown-catch PS. It's worth suffering thru the obligatory ad to see the shots.

Thanks guys, I need to process all that info but I haven't seen anything yet to dissuade me from continuing with the I-Beam approach. I figure if worse comes to worse we can always designate the great room as a hard hat only area and if the ceiling does come down we'll just say that it was San Andreas fault.

In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, but for me this project has consumed my every waking moment for the last 18 months. So here is the deal. To get any kind of a workable floor plan in my farmhouse remodel project I need to replace a load bearing wall with couple of steel I-Beams. What I’d like to know is how I-Beams are customarily tied into a typical wall framed with 2x6 studs? In my situation I am dealing with an 8’ ceiling with a span of about 18’ between 2 walls which are framed with 2x6 lumber. I’m guessing that some sort of steel tubing with flanges welded on the ends are customarily used to support the I-Beam but I see no reason why a 4 x 6 wood beam wouldn’t do the trick. The I-Beams only weigh 12.5 lbs per foot as opposed to about 10 lbs per foot for a Douglas Fir 4 x 12. My plan is to jack the I-Beams up underneath the existing ceiling joists and then support them with the 4x6 posts to carry the load to the foundation. I have come up with a design which I think should do the trick but I would be interested in feedback from anybody who might have first-hand experience installing I-Beams. Because the ceiling is relatively low (and I am relatively high, 6’ 6”) it is imperative that the beams protrude down into the room as little as possible. This is why I have decided on the steel I-Beam approach as opposed to a 4 x header or some type of structural composite lumber beam. If I can pull it off I should be able to encase the I-Beams in a soffit and have myself a poor mans coffered ceiling. Kindly peruse the attached thumbnails and let me know what you think.

Phew! Glad you got that sorted out CADman. I imagine having your danglers clipped can be a serious (and potentially painful) problem.

Don't get me started Curt. You can throw the bankers in there with the politicians. They are all thick as thieves, that bunch. My wonderful financial institution recently tried to stick a $20 service charge on my "high yield" savings account. I had to explain to the bank manager in a voice that everybody in the establishment could hear, that if I allowed them to take that money out of my account it would mean that I would have been better off financially if I had kept the money in my mattress because the annual percentage yield earned on that savings account is 0.08. That's right, were not talking a meager 8 tenths of a percent, we're talking 8 hundredths of a percent. BTW, I went back about a week later and withdrew all my funds from that bank and deposited them in the bank across the street. When they asked why I was closing my accounts I told them it was because I don't like having an adversarial relationship with the people I'm entrusting my money to. Of course I'm not getting a better deal across the street but it still makes me feel better.

Chief now has spiral ducting you can download in the 3D Library.

Sheesh! The things you learn. So it turns out that there are four ways to exit Chief. You can hit Alt+F4, You can hit the File drop down menu and then hit Exit, you can hit the Chief Architect Premier X6 icon in the upper left hand corner and then hit Close or you can hit the X in the upper right hand corner. No matter which method you select you will get a reminder to save your work if you have a plan open. So I guess the point is that Chief recommends that you save your plan first and then exit the program by whatever method you choose as opposed to exiting the program and then saving your work when prompted to do so. I still don't see what the difference is. And while I'm thinking about it why on earth is Windows still using a 3 1/2" floppy disc as an icon for saving your work? There is probably a whole generation using computers now who have never seen a 3 1/2" floppy disc. Here is my suggestion for a new Save icon.

No, no, no, don't get your hopes up. Not me but the program. I'm sure this is a no brainer for the majority of you but it came as news to me. In a moment of weakness as I was reading the reference manual I came across the procedure for exiting the program. I mean when faced with over a thousand pages of reference material how many people take the time to read the part about exiting the program? Well, I did and it turns out that there is a preferred method to exit the program. There have been many times that I have closed Chief with a plan still open. No biggie right, the program simply asks you if you want to save the current plan or not. It turns out that this is not the preferred method. The manual doesn't say why but it does say: "Select File> Exit to exit the program. If you have not saved any open plans, you are reminded to do so. It is better to save your work before exiting than to save on exit". I can't for the life of me see how this would make any difference.

A little like closing the barn door after the horses are gone, but check out this link to the Corsair website. You can test your power supply with literally nothing more than a paper clip. I had a rig that became increasingly unstable finally to the point of being unbootable. While in it's death throws it manifested numerous symptoms; memory error beep codes, video driver error messages, a totally unresponsive mouse and others I am probably forgetting. I troubleshot everything from the video and mouse drivers to swapping out memory chips to by passing the case power switch to testing the power supply and lord know what else before I came to the grim realization that the culprit was the motherboard itself. This pissed me off to no end since it was a very pricy top of the line MB and of course you have to tear your rig completely down to replace it. http://www.corsair.com/en-us/support/faqs/power-supplies

Drat! Someone's on to me.

So last Saturday night I sat down at the keyboard at 11:00 PM and worked on my site plan until 3:00AM at which time I reset all my clocks back one hour and went to bed. Does this mean that I only spent 3 hours on the drawing?

I would love to have the capability to be able to vary the sizes of distributed objects as well as the spacing and rotational angle, however I'm not sure I have the total grasp of the concepts necessary to make a feasible request. It's always interesting to me just what computer programs think "random" is. One could make the argument that any combination is possible. It just depends on the size of the sample and the time over which it is taken. It's the old "room full of monkeys banging away at typewriters" that would eventually write all the great works of literature if given enough time deal. Actually I have had this sick idea festering in the back of my mind that I should vary the heights of the trees to exactly correspond to the heights of the actual trees. This of course would require me to individually edit all 160 trees. Aaarrrggghhh! BTW, to update that room full of monkeys deal maybe it would be more appropriate to speculate that a room full of monkeys at the keyboard with Chief could eventually design the Taj Mahal.

I am truly blessed Lew. With all the good and bad decisions we end up making in life, somehow I managed to land on my feet in making perhaps the biggest decision of all, where we are going to live. Funny you should mention fencing and walk flows. After about 2 weeks on the property I made my first major investment and bought myself a Honda Recon ATV. I haven't regretted it for one moment since . The fences were all erected by the dear little lady who previously owned the place. She was a legend in the neighborhood on her tractor with her post hole digger. The fences do help control the flow of wild critters across the property. Here is a rafter of the local gals out for their morning constitutional.

OK, here’s the poop. First off thanks for all the suggestions. I had a play with this over the weekend and this is what I came up with. As suggested, there are several ways to go about spacing out and rotating a row of trees. But… but… but… there is no way I can find to automagically vary the heights of the trees. I’m a visually oriented guy and I start to glaze over when I’m 700+ pages into the manual and trying to sort out Absolute and Relative angles, so I prepared a little demonstration with a generic tree fitted with a dorsal fin to aide in observing the changes in object orientation. In the end I used a combination of approaches. I broke the trees into 8 groups of 20 trees each which also happens to be way they are laid out for irrigation purposes. Then I created 8 Polyline Distribution Paths using the Random Angle Object Orientation and increasing the mean height of the trees in each path to create a stair step effect. I chose the Polyline Distribution Path over the Transform/Replicate option because it offered the Random Angle feature. Finally, (and Glenn neglected to mention this ), I exploded the Distributed Objects which enables the selection of individual trees again and manually adjusted the heights of about 75% of them to get the desired ascending – descending effect for the whole line of trees. I won’t bore you with how long this process took but suffice it to say that if I was hiring Bryce to do it I would be out hundreds of dollars. Anyhoo, there they are. 160 trees with no 2 alike. BTW, this is for a site plan I am working on for my spread here. The area encompassed by the fence is exactly 2 acres and contains all of the structures on the property. I still have several structures and dozens of trees to add to the plan (file size is currently 18MB and climbing).

Wasn't that back when dinosaurs roamed the earth? Where did you play? My meteoric career was cut tragically short when I blew out my ACL in my sophomore year at San Jose State.

I don't know Cadman, when I placed both of those symbols in a plan neither one looked to be 3D. I've wasted all the time I'm going to trying to figure out how get the Plant Chooser and the Library Browser synced up. I have created a plan specifically for 3D plants and I just drag the symbol in question into that plan and see how it looks. Since I can rarely find the specific type of plant (especially trees) I want I usually end up picking out a symbol that resembles what I am looking for and going with that.

Here's my approach. Let me preface these remarks by saying that I run all my "A" programs on a dedicated stand alone workstation. If you are on a network I wouldn't necessarily advocate this approach. First off I almost never install a new program while connected to the internet (the rare exception being some software updates downloaded from the internet). Obviously I always try to obtain a hard copy (CD DVD etc.) of the software I buy and install. Once a program is installed I will then connect to the internet to activate and update it as necessary. This approach precludes having the installation programs running amok and installing all kinds of unnecessary things. The first thing I do after installing Windows is to systematically disable Windows Update, Messenger and Windows Firewall. I also run without any anti- virus software whatsoever. IMHO, antivirus software is by its nature a virus (a benign virus hopefully but a virus none the less) that always runs in the background using up valuable resources and interfering with normal computer operations. I don't use my workstation to surf the internet. I have older "retired" rigs that I use for that. I tend to upgrade at semi-regular intervals and when I do I usually upgrade everything at the same time. For example my previous rig was a Pentium4 running Windows XP Pro, Internet Explorer 8, Office 2003, Adobe Acrobat 9 etc. It was so stable and reliable that I used it until much of the software had become "sunset" and the advent of newer versions finally forced me to upgrade. Now I'm up to Windows 7 Ultimate, Internet Explorer 11, Office 2010 and Adobe Acrobat 10. When I get a good combination of compatible programs I rarely worry about updating them unless something comes along that is really worthwhile. I don't mind being a version or two behind what is considered to be cutting edge as I find these programs are usually more stable and have had any major problems resolved. What does all of this mean? You tell me. I find my rigs to be fast, reliable and crash free. And in the event that something should go terribly awry I am not above taking a night off and doing a fresh install of Windows and all my programs. In fact I advocate this practice from time to time to give your rig a new lease on life.

You could go to DJP's house.

Lisa, what Scott was so eloquently trying to say is that if you enable "show shadows" in the Render/ Preview Options section of the Preferences menu the shadows will always stay on (even when panning and rotating). A very nice touch. BTW, I think the speed with which the shadows are now rendered is more a function of an improvement in version X6 than your fast Mac. They are fast for everyone now.

I would be interested in knowing what kind of speed increase you realize if you get around to overclocking your CPU. I have never put the overclocking capabilities of my rig to use as for the most part the plans I work with haven't been that complex and I haven't seen the need. Nice crisp RT's BTW, and your second image reminds me that roundball season starts tonite.

LOL! I don't remember which of the first astronauts it was. Alan Shepard, I believe, who when asked what he was thinking while sitting on top of a rocket about to be launched into space replied that he was thinking that the rocket had been built by the lowest bidder. BTW, I think I'm beginning to see why your internet connection is so slow. Time-Warner isn't going to upgrade service to that overpass any time soon.