Grayling

I had thought of Sketchup. I used to use it a lot years ago. Before Google bought and sold it.

I own a remodeling business that has started manufacturing cable handrail kits. I use Chief for my plans for my remodeling projects. I started drawing my parts and posts for my cable handrail kits using Chief CAD. I have the full version of Chief. I'm having a heck of a time using Chief for this purpose. Is there a software that manufacturers use for creating catalogs for Chief? I'd like to create a catalog both for use in Chief and for submittals for my projects. Any ideas?

I think they just mean it's scalable. So I've uploaded to the city eplans website and we'll see what happens. I did verify that the plans were clean to read and that they were scalable. So I hope it's all good. The corona virus I think speeded up my embrace of this plan submittal method. But like every place, they want us all to use AutoCAD. Which I haven't used in over 20 years. Thanks for your thoughts!

My building department is allowing eplan submissions. The .dwg files need to be converted to a Vector pdf file using: AutoDesk Vector Graphic Converter "DWG to PDF.pc3 plotter driver. I tried working with Adobe since I have the full Adobe license to all their products. They had some information about going into the registry and editing it. Which I did with some HKEY additions, but I still couldn't get the .dwg to vector pdf file to work. Do you know if there is any way to do this with Chief? I'm really confused. These are not standard pdf's. Thank you

Thank you

What about the physical posts themselves? I’m not as concerned about the symbols, as the actual posts that I create a library for.

After many years in construction, we’ve started manufacturing our own deck posts. We would like to have a catalog in Chief so we can place these new posts on our Chief drawings. There are no posts that are similar to ours that we can modify. So we would like to make our own from scratch. I’m trying to visualize the steps to do this. I have approximately 10 different posts to make in Chief. I would also like to have a different symbol for each post so we can design for clients also and show where they need to set their posts. So I think I’m asking for 2 things. 1. How to make a catalog from scratch of approximately 10 items. 2. How to make symbols to match up to the catalog items. Here’s a link to our YouTube page to get an idea of what our posts look like. To make the catalog of posts, I was thinking of opening a plan file, creating posts using CAD objects. I can do that part, it’s the next steps of making the catalog encompassing those 10 posts. Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

I agree. It's kind of crazy how CA doesn't work with Xerox printers and that you can't get a decent print from a xerox using CA. I don't know who is at fault, but it has been driving me crazy for years.

It shouldn't take adjusting the printer. There has to be something else wrong.

Here's 2 examples. I can print them on 2 totally different printers. Both show them incredibly dark. They look great on the screen. But definitely not something you could print and share with a client. example 1.pdf example2.pdf

They always look great on the screen. Then I print and they are so dark they are worthless for client meetings. I save them as jpeg and open on photoshop and fix. That’s the only way I can use the perspectives. I have adjusted lighting in the plan and found no difference. I’ve adjusted everything I can possibly find and can’t figure it out. Ive looked for a video that shows the steps to create a perspective and put it into a layout page. It would be nice to find out what I’m doing wrong. I’ve looked at a lot of videos, but none really focus on proper settings for correct lighting for perspectives. This shouldn’t be this difficult.

Could you post a link to examples of your work?